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Senate Candidate Sued By Copyright Troll
The Iso writes "Las Vegas based company Righthaven found two articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal about Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle reprinted on her web site without permission, so it did what it always does: bought the rights to the articles from the Review-Journal and sued the alleged infringer, seeking unspecified damages."
Now we just need a Paul Allen to step up and sue a senator for patent infringement, and maybe we'll get an ear in the Senate to put a stop to this craziness.
Hopefully Righthaven finds more politicians to sue. Lots more. Then maybe - just maybe - will we get some consumer friendly copyright laws. In this case it would appear that Sharron Angle is indeed guilty of willful infringement, but if more politicians get hurt in their own pocket by copyright suits then the chance of them creating laws that states that damages must fit the crime may actually come into effect. That would kill the business model behind the *IAA cartel suits.
Meus subcriptio est nocens Latin quoniam bardus populus reputo is sanus callidus
Righthaven did not create the article in question. They bought the rights from the creators solely so they could sue the infringer and profit from her. That sounds like copyright trolling to me.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
They cannot empathize with others, they cannot feel the emotions of another. They are totally and completely self centered. So long as something is good for them, they do it.
Most people associate the term with serial killers and it is true, all serial killers I'm aware of are sociopaths, but there are actually a surprising amount of them. Nearly 10% of the population is like that. Most are just inconsiderate assholes, the sort of people that just don't seem to care when they cause problems for others.
That's what happens with people like this. They seem to have no morals because they don't. They'll act perfectly justified in their actions, After all, it is all within the law, why shouldn't they do this? You are stupid for not doing it! Etc, etc.
You will also find, that when someone does something to them the same as they do to others, they get PISSED. It is COMPLETELY different when done to them and they can't see the irony in that.
Happened to a spammer some years ago. He got interviewed by a local paper. He justified his spamming as being no big deal, people could just delete it, didn't cost them anything, etc, etc. What he did was 100% fine according to him. He also bragged on his new $800,000 house. Enterprising Slashdotters figured there couldn't have been many houses sold in that area at that price in the timescale talked about. They were right: There was one. As a result he was signed up for more or less every mailing list there was. A postal truck full of mail would show up every day.
He was livid, threatened to sue any and everyone, hissed, spitted and screamed about how big a problem this was. No recognition, at all, that this was just like what he did to others. In his mind inconveniencing other people was fine, but him being inconvenienced was a crime of epic proportions. Reason is he can only understand his own emotions and needs. Other people are just objects to him.
No, that makes it sound like the LV Review Journal aren't party to it. In fact the owners of the NVRJ also own Rightshaven. They set up the arrangement to pursue copyright infringers.
http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/sherm/Copyright_theft_Were_not_taking_it_anymore.html?ref=164
There's no copyright trolling here. Just a case of setting up a separate company to do the pursuit of copyright infringement. A company which can then also offer that service to other content creators.
It's perfectly reasonable. Neither LV RJ nor Rightshaven are at fault here. The only people who are at fault are those who steal their content rather than create it themselves; who copy and paste rather than link; who go beyond fair use, and just reproduce the whole article.
There's some deep irony here. After the Nevada primary Angle changed her website to make her seem more consistent with the mainstream values of the Republican party. The Reid campaign, sensing an opportunity, archived her old website and put it online at http://www.therealsharronangle.com/ This, of course, really irked the Angle campaign who attempted to use copyright law against the Nevada state Democratic party to squash the publication of the site.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...