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!)."

Comments

Re:A limited reading

[mcgrew]

Case in point, judicial districts still use antiquated technology to function. The New York Judicial Courts, for instance, still mandate the use of WordPerfect as its preferred format.

I have both Word Perfect and MS Word on my work computer, and there's nothing I can do in Word I can't do in Word Perfect, even though Word is the 1997 version.

A word processor is a word processor. Word Perfect circa 1990 is still as useful as it was when it was new. Replacing a perfectly useable tool when a newer tool offers no advantage over the old tool is fiscally irresponsible.

If you'd have said "they're still mandating Netscape" or "still using IE6" or "still using DOS" or "still using 486 computers" you might have had a point, but note they're not using typewriters. Why would anyone "upgrade" a word processor? Word processing was pretty much perfected two decades ago; there has been no true innovation that would increase productivity or usefulness whatever since.