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!)."
And the people who come to slashdot and think they have the right to any non-physical copyrightted work, even without paying for it.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
No, it means that if you put a button on your site saying "Click here to copy part of this story to your website!", you can't then sue people for copying parts of the story. It would be like YouTube suing people for using the embed links they post.
That isn't how the 'share' functionality on news sites work. It shares a link to the story with the headline and the first few sentences, not the entire article.
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?