Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper May Have Given Implicit License To Copy
An anonymous reader writes "Following up on the story of Righthaven, the 'copyright troll' that is working with the Las Vegas Journal Review to sue lots of websites (including one of Nevada's Senate candidates) for reposting articles from the LVRJ, a judge in one of the cases appears to be quite sympathetic to the argument that the LVRJ offered an 'implied license' to copy by not just putting their content online for free, but including tools on every story that say 'share this' with links to various sharing services (including one tool to 'share' via Slashdot!)."
If common sense finally wins in one of these cases, it'll be the end of the world as we know it.
Until they file an appeal.
Do not feed the copyright troll. This is interesting. I have a feeling that very soon, the court system is going to start getting sick of the abuses of the copyright system, which may spur some changes. Of course, this has been said many times before.
Their articles need posting to a few hundred websites more... that way they can become partners with the **AA gang in the mass-mail lawsuits business. It's all part of a plan for a DOS attack on the justice system.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It's a double-edged sword. Lets see how the trolls like being sliced with it.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Wouldnt this mean that any sharing of a link to your content would also give an implied license to copy?
How exactly is this going to work? Does this mean that all newspaper stories are freely usable by anyone?... That will sure break a lot of things... :p
I just want to note that the Righthaven v. Klerks decision linked to in the article should actually be read on fairly narrow grounds. The whole issue of Righthaven is whether to vacate a default judgment entered against Righthaven. In order to vacate the default judgment, the defendant had to show that they 1) weren't culpable in defaulting, 2) they had a meritorious defense to the original case, and 3) not vacating the default judgment will prejudice the defendant.
The whole part about the implicit license to copy and fair use was applied only to the question of whether Righthaven had a meritorious defense. However, it does not mean that the defense is a winning defense, merely that it wouldn't be laughed out of court if they asserted it. I don't think this really offers that much precedent beyond the narrow scope of the motion.
In any case, while I disagree with Righthaven (and I agree with the judge on the matter of fair use), something doesn't exactly sit right with me with the Judge's argument that the newspaper gave an implied consent to copy the newspaper. Part of the reasoning is that the newspaper permitted the user to "'right-click' and copy the article". This seems like a dog of an argument to me. Practically all websites allow users to right click (except for Dr. Ann de Wees Allen) and copy the content from their webpages - that doesn't seem like it means that everything is offered on the web with an implied license to copy. Rather, the fact that the newspaper had links to share a link to the content on facebook or twitter or whatever - and thus should only really be read to have given implied consent to link, not to copy.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
As others have explained above, this judgment isn't so much a precedent as it is a judge saying that the argument *might* work. However- it shows remarkable reasonableness on the part of the judge. After all, if I put a fruit bowl on a table with a note that said "Take one and have a nice day!", I could hardly turn around and sue you for banana-theft.
If they had a "Share via Slashdot!" tool, then a few paragraphs from their articles may be on Slashdot... which means unless those bastards are stopped, there's a good chance they might sue geeknet for copywrong infringement at some point.
something doesn't exactly sit right with me with the Judge's argument that the newspaper gave an implied consent to copy the newspaper. Part of the reasoning is that the newspaper permitted the user to "'right-click' and copy the article". This seems like a dog of an argument to me.
As a dog owner, I take umbrage with that statement. It's a terrible argument on a few grounds, including those you mention as well as:
1) The right click thing is ludicrous, as you state and more. The site doesn't provide right-click functionality, the browser does. The site in question would have had to take extreme measures (like the de Wees Allen gambit) to prevent it, which never ends up working anyway. Besides, there are fair uses for newspaper articles (which would presumably be killed by effective copy protection) - just not necessarily this one.
2) Didn't we have this whole link vs. content thing before with sites that link to pirated works, CSS keys, things like that? Aren't "we" on the side that sharing a link is completely different than providing content? So they should be able to provide a *link* without that being interpreted as providing the content, right?
3) I really, really don't like the "it was freely (as in beer) available, so now there's an implicit license. Sounds a lot like the whole 'GPL software is in the public domain
I think Ive been patient enough, you are starting to bore me now.
While I dont like to, I will put my foot down now;
The following commandments should be chiseled in stone, engraved by laser in a meteorite, embedded in the standard neck-chip or other method suitable for your preferred epoch:
NO TRADEMARKS
No string of characters, numbers or symbols may be claimed as property.
Products may be labeled with, in addition to name, manufacturers address, which it is a sin to falsify.
NO PATENTS
If you are first with an idea, you may use that to your advantage or not.
NO COPYRIGHT
No restraints may be put on sharing of information and ideas.
It has nothing to do with the "ability" to copy by not disallowing the right click; that's indeed ludicrous, but has no bearing on reality. The reality is the newspaper invited copying with a "copy this article" link and "share via digg" link.
Having a "copy this article link" then suing because somebody copied it is as ludicrous as Google suing someone who used their "copy url" in one of thier Google Maps or Google streetviews.
You can't give someone a present then try to get them arrested for stealing.
Free Martian Whores!
But I feel fine!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The paper is called the Las Vegas Review-Journal, not Journal Review. http://www.lvrj.com/
check your copy much? oh, yeah...
Beware of the Leopard.
...their providing of "tools" on their website to help facilitate sharing content even goes so far as to constitute the granting explicit permission/license to copy.
The purpose of Trademark is not to ensure profit, but to prevent the public being misled into thinking something is what it is not.
The hoodwinkers used to sell placibo (or worse) as the current BrandName medicine, even with FDA labeling, how many people today would question whether something marked Tylenol or Bayer actually work, if the back of the box says 'no active ingredients' how many people will notice?
Trademark law allows BrandName places to sue those that use their BrandName thus helping to ensure that if anyone is making poor quality goods and selling it under their BrandName it is the Brand itself doing so, and people will (hopefully) come to realize that the Brand isn't good anymore and will stop buying. However, a Brand that actually makes good things can get a following of people and those people can trust that if it has that Brand on it then it probably is good (at least as good as they are used to).
Preventing people from marketing knockoffs as the real thing is good for consumers (free market requires buyers to make informed decisions), as people can quickly see who is selling the item.
Judges are human, and Righthaven is a bag of dicks. Righthaven sues their own sources for posting stories that the sources gave to the paper for free. It's entirely likely the judge stayed up late looking for ways to get these people off the hook. Law is not code. It is a human institution subject to human anti-dickhead prejudices.
This usually works in the other direction: Internet freedoms are frequently tested in the court on behalf of creepy child abusers. Maybe we should try to avoid that?
Sharing an article on Slashdot or Facebook only shares an abstract and a *link* to the article. You're still viewing the article in full from the original source.
Saying that the "Share" button is a license to copy the entire article is like saying that musicians and record labels give you a license to copy by letting you hear a 30-second preview.
Immoral, but I think not illegal. It's a kind of legal baiting. Perhaps the best thing to do is to starts hundreds of thousands of these cases, until some courts press legislators to change the law and stop the nonsense. Perhaps we could raise some money to pay salaries for a couple hundred open source programmers.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The problem with "share this" is that putting such a thing on your site pretty much demonstrates .. totally undefined intent. You're requesting people (no wait .. not people) to spread a link, but have little idea what they'll do with it.
Furthermore, you're requesting that they spread it in a rather mechanical and robotic fashion. The whole value of the share-this button is the implied automation, that you don't want to rely on humans to take the initiative to go to some other site and talk about your webpage. You want them to just click something, and the less thinking they do, the better.
If I email a link to you, the most common way for you to handle that is either not follow the link, or (as a human) follow the link and read the page, and in so doing, you will (possibly) become informed of what the copyright holder authorizes, when you see a copyright notice or license, or even a tone (e.g. if the page is a rant about how copyright needs to be repealed, it's reasonable to assume certain things about the author's intent) .
But when I send a link as a parameter in an URL to another web service or as a field in some XML request, I'm requesting a computer to do something with a link, and we all know that computers don't understand issues like copyright and licensing, so the computer is going to make some sort of default assumption about what it's allowed to do.
What is a reasonable default assumption? It turns out that there is no consensus on this. The copyright-centric view is that you're not allowed to do something unless you are told it's ok to do that, or if copyright law allows it (perhaps via fair use). The "old internet" view is that merely by servicing the request, the server intends for the information to be widely spread (i.e. you don't expect any SMTP server to have a policy of: "I refuse to deliver this email unless I find something in it that suggests the sender grants permission for it to be forwarded" -- that would be ludicrous).
At some point, a judge is going to make a decision about what's a reasonable assumption. And he's going to be wrong (whichever way he goes) in many peoples' eyes, because this decision must be arbitrary. The very question of what is "reasonable" is a bullshit question, because reason can't help you here. It's a matter of desires and values and assumptions, not reason and logic.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I am a freelance writer. Most of the time, I contract with my newspaper to sell a stories (and the rights thereto) to that one publication. Yet when I search for myself on Google these days, I find more and more links to the full text of my articles on Web sites with names like "freebizarticlessourcedestination.com" (* not sure if that's a real site; I use that name purely for example).
And, more and more often, my name shows up attached to the story without the name of the publication.
Seeing this on some guy's shill site irks me, even though legally it's not my problem - I sold the rights to that story, it's the newspaper's story now. Even so, this reflects on me when it appears I may have written this story for the site in question. I don't write "content" for Web sites; I write for newspapers as a freelance journalist. And I don't like the thought of my work being plagiarized or repackaged, in general, although at this point the money is less of an issue than the annoyance of it being taken out of context.
I told you guys those web 2.0 buttons would be useful for something