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Righthaven Adds Forum Posters To Copyright Suit
eldavojohn writes "The last time we discussed the Las Vegas Review-Journal and their litigating attorneys at Righthaven LLC, they were suing all the websites that had violated their news copyrights. Well, they've now added seven individual message board posters that they've managed to identify, bringing the number of DMCA-related lawsuits they have launched since March to 203. In one case, LVRJ is upset that a Google Groups user named Jim_Higgins posted a column that cited the columnist but failed to cite the original LVRJ article. But Google Groups is protected from these suits, as the article explains: 'Both the madjacksports and Google sites are somewhat protected from copyright lawsuits because they have posted "DMCA" notices as required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These notices, which must be registered with the US Copyright Office, inform copyright holders who to contact if they would like infringing material removed.' The first decision of this cluster of lawsuits was against Righthaven, yet the onslaught continues. Righthaven has publicly dismissed fair use as well."
Copyright maximalists like to make that claim, but the law says in black and white that Fair Use is a limitation on the scope of copyright. That means that if a use is Fair Use, it is by definition not infringing (whether the artificial monopoly holder likes it, or not).
You can quibble over whether a citizen's rights come from Fair Use, or simply from the fact that in the absence of copyright, the citizen would have a natural free speech right to copy and use the material. But it is misleading to assert that a citizen who is (correctly) asserting Fair Use has no rights; that the artificial monopoly recipient has an absolute monopoly; for that simply is not how the law is written, or how the law is supposed to work.