The Las Vegas Review-Journal has a new business model: filing lawsuits against everyone who reprints their stories online. Fair enough, but Righthaven, the company that bought the Review-Journal’s copyright and is managing the lawsuits, got greedy. Yesterday, a judge threw out a suit where Righthaven claimed infringement by a blogger who quoted 8 sentences of a 30 sentence story and linked back to the Review-Journal.
There’s another lawsuit pending where Righthaven sued the Democratic Underground for a five-sentence excerpt that included a link back to the Journal. That suit claimed damages of up to $150,000. The Review-Journal position is that anything but a quote of the headline and first paragraph is not fair use.
Here’s a little hint for the Review-Journal: when you have a competitor in town, bloggers who want to discuss Las Vegas politics will link to their stories about voter suppression, the Angle/Reed race, the Tea Party Express and anything else that happens in your neck of the woods.
brantl
“Instant Karma’s going to get you.” John was right about so many things.
Maude
Fair use. That’s why the suit got tossed.
dr. bloor
File this under “Working the Refs.”
These are only frivolous suits until they find a friendly judge to rule in their favor, and start the appeals process up a chain of increasingly-corporate-friendly appeals courts to the always corporate-friendly SCOTUS. In a judicial environment where corporations are people and up is down, this sort of thing is completely predictable.
cathyx
You would think their traffic would go up by the use of these links, and that would be a good thing. Go figure.
MikeJ
The newspaper people keep promising us that their industry is dying, but like the record companies they’re still dirty rotten liars.
Ash Can
IIRC, the Sun is the better paper on top of it.
Punchy
I suppose they are unawares of just how unkind the blogosphere will be when they’ve done pissed ’em off. Isn’t allowing fair use and linkage really the only way for someone in Austin to see their paper? Do they really think they can sell subscriptions to peeps in Jax?
jwb
So the Review-Journal is trying to drive itself to extinction. Why don’t they just erect a pay wall and put itself out of its misery?
Alex S.
I wonder who goes down first: Harry Reid or the LVRJ.
wmsheppa
@Ash Can: Seconded. Lived in Las Vegas for a couple years, and the RJ is a complete and total joke.
ET
Wonder when they are going to start suing students and others for using something from an article with proper attribution, for using “too much” (according to their definition of too much)?
I assume they are going to continue to pound away and hope they get lucky. Why they want to waste money on lawyers fees of piddling shit is a complete mystery. I guess they feel that if they hit someone who can’t/won’t fight back that they can make a few bucks.
I wonder how much in lawyers fees and related costs they spent on this case and the DU one? Considering good lawyers can charge hundreds of dollars an hour the bill was not likely small. After expenses, they couldn’t have made that much on piddly cases like these.
Sly
Its funny how 151 civil suits filed by a company with lawyers on permanent retainer against small independent operators for the purpose of maintaining an unfair competitive advantage would NEVER be considered frivolous in GOPtopia.
I hope one of their cases reaches the 9th Circuit and the court fines the shit out of their legal department.
gbear
If dinosaurs just made better friends, maybe they wouldn’t be extinct.
(via cake wrecks)
Uncle Monty
Unfortunately, the Sun isn’t really a competitor to the RJ:
Warren Terra
Pikers. A few years ago the AP floated the notion of claiming ifringement and demanding royalties starting with a five-word phrase as the lower limit: if you used a five-word phrase from an AP story, they’d sue your ass. Like, say, “President of the United States”.
Mike B
@Uncle Monty: The printed version of the Sun is actually distributed as part of the Review Journal. However, the web site — and reporting — is completely independent of the LVRJ. The editorial politics is quite different, too; the LVRJ leans right, the Sun leans Democratic.
BTW, there is a fine, snarky progressive blog here in Las Vegas called Las Vegas Gleaner — for anyone who’s interested.