Slashdot Mirror
Newspapers' New Revenue Plan — Copyright Suits
SpicyBrownMustard writes "Wired magazine has coverage of the numerous lawsuits recently filed by Righthaven, LLC regarding the content of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. 'Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he's making money.' The owner of the LVRJ has commented on the strategy, and the Las Vegas Sun has extensive coverage of each suit filed. The owner of one site has apparently settled for more than the site has made in six years. Media Matters suspects many of the suits may be politically motivated, and thus violate federal election law."
The owned of acdc-bootlegs.com site mentioned in the summary isn't exactly innocent either.
To begin with, the site is devoted to offer downloads of bootlegs, which according to current copyright laws is illegal. Even if you don't think it's a big deal, you have to go by laws.
What the current lawsuit is about is the use of copyrighted content from news sites (and not in fair use manner), again a copyright infringement.
Then he is also doing click fraud:
One thing you can do is click on the Google ads on the left side of all of the pages on this site. I make a few cents from each click, which will go directly to paying the settlement. So the more you click, the more you help. And it's free to you! You do not need to fill out any forms or submit your personal information; just click on the link, let the page load and go from there.
The way the /. story title and summary is worded makes it sound bad, but this guy is also blatantly breaking several laws and frauding advertisers to generate money. He just got what he asked for. He should be happy AC/DC or Google hasn't sued him.