Righthaven To Explain Why Reposting Isn't Fair Use

Ponca City, We love you writes "TechDirt reports that a judge has asked Righthaven to explain why a non-profit organization reposting an entire article isn't fair use. The case involves the Center for Intercultural Organizing of Portland, Oregon, which was sued by Righthaven in August after an entire 33-paragraph Review-Journal story about Las Vegas immigrants was posted on the center's website, crediting the Review-Journal. The nonprofit says it was founded by Portland-area immigrants and refugees to combat widespread anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11 and it works to strengthen immigrant and refugee communities through education, civic engagement, organizing and mobilization and does not charge subscription fees or derive any income from its website. The interesting thing is that the defendant in this case didn't even raise the fair use issue. It was the judge who brought it up, suggesting that the Nevada judges are being inundated with hundreds of Righthaven cases, and that Righthaven has already lost once in a case that was found to be fair use so judges may want to set a precedent to clear their dockets."

Comments

Re:"Because we say so"

[Anonymous Coward]

They posted the full story on their own site, that's not remotely close to fair-use. They should have done an editorial selecting various points and link back to the original. This is a blatant copyright violation, just as much as providing direct download of copyrighted music and video.

Re:WTF is Righthaven

[Aladrin]

Unsuspecting? Are people who infringe on IP ever 'expecting' a lawsuit? Is it suddenly unfair to sue them just because they are ignorant of the law?

Re:My view.

[canajin56]

Most newspapers are for-profit, so there goes that claim. Hard to sell newspapers when others are giving away your work for free (Yes I"m ignoring the fact the lvrj posted it on their website).

However, they are not being sued by the LVRJ, they are being sued by a puppet corporation that LVRJ sold the article to in exchange for a license to keep using it in the LVRJ. So, since their puppet corporation is not publishing it and is not making any money off of it except by suing, that will be a hard sell. If anything, since the only way this puppet corporation makes money is by being sold articles so it can attack, republishing LVRJ increases their revenues, so the effect is "positive" ;) Not that I think it's right to republish entire articles, even with permission, just because you are a non-profit. But since they aren't being sued by the LVRJ...

Re:"Because we say so"

[Anonymous Coward]

And I would say the advertising revenue is of no concern whatsoever in this case, since the party losing the ad revenue is the newspaper, but... (wait for it...) they aren't the ones suing.
Righthaven takes copyright of an article, and licenses it back to the newspaper. At that point, the economic value of the article to Righthaven is exhausted. There is no further "ad revenue" coming in to them.
Now, they could possibly resell the article to other newspapers, but they aren't, because that isn't their business model. Their entire business model is making money by suing "infringers". In this case, the economic value to Righthaven is INCREASED by someone else posting it in its entirety.

This is nothing but the newspaper equivalent of the MPAA/RIAA lawsuits, where you smack someone for infringement, extort them for a settlement because they can't afford to defend themselves in court, then move on to the next person. One of their lawsuits has already been dismissed and found to be baseless, how many settlements have been made on similar cases, that might have been thrown out had the defendants had the money to fight in court?

Re:This is black letter law

[Attila Dimedici]

Ordinarily, I would agree with you. However, Righthaven is a company that exists for the sole purpose of filing copyright lawsuits against anyone who uses any part of an article published by the Las Vegas Review Journal. Righthaven does not publish anything. As far as I can tell, they don't even sell the rights to publish anything. What you miss is that since the organization being sued is a non-profit, Righthaven must show how their publishing of the article reduces Righthaven's ability to make money from the article. Since Righthaven doesn't make money from the article (except from copyright infringement lawsuits), this will be a hard sell in court.

Re:"Because we say so"

[91degrees]

Interesting. So does Righthaven simply purchase a swathe of articles and hope that someone infringes, or do they wait for someone to infringe and then buy the article?

Either way, this does change things. If the former then their net profit from a typical article is negligible and the net loss is also extremely small considering the value they place on an article (this business model will not be viable if they pay a reasonable amount per article). If the latter then it seems bizarre to buy a property known to be damaged and then sue the person who damaged it, and this is essentially what they are doing.

Re:WTF is Righthaven

[Pharmboy]

I thought we still had some notion of "Innocent til proven guilty" in this country

Only in criminal cases, not civil cases.

I am also a bit weary about jumping to the defense of the non-profit on this one. While they did give credit properly, they didn't include excerpts, they copied the entire article wholesale. My understanding of copyright and fair use seems to tell me that this is not actually "fair use" and actually is infringing, as it does prevent any need to go to the original author to read the whole thing, and *does* deprive the content creator the ability to profit from their work. That is the idea of copyright, granting an exclusive right to profit for a limit amount of time, in exchange for the content eventually becoming public domain. That the non-profit didn't make a profit off the work isn't meaningful, and the content creator was denied the opportunity to.

That said, it is the kind of infringing that warrants a "you need to remove the article as a whole, and only use excerpts, instead pointing to the original article" type of letter, not legal action. At some point, the courts need to throw these cases out simply because the court shouldn't be the first course of action, and should instead be the LAST RESORT, after other reasonable methods have been exhausted.