Righthaven To Explain Why Reposting Isn't Fair Use 169
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."
Huh???? (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, I understand reposting excerpts, I understand reposting articles with the author's permission. But just reposting full articles while giving credit (somewhere) to the source is fair use?
I don't get it..... doesn't it just mean that people can copy entire websites willy-nilly and as long as they provide a buried link to the original source, its a-ok?
Re:"Because we say so" (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
The company creates no value, and acts to remove value from the marketplace via litigation. While the ostensible purpose is to protect the interests of the LV Review-Journal, I question whether a newspaper--no matter how well or poorly circulated--would need an entire company to protect its intellectual property; last I checked, that was usually handled by the newspapers' legal department.
So as far as I can tell, Righthaven has no legitimate reason to exist--and I'd be very happy if it and all other similar companies that exist only to parasitize others' work were dissolved.
Re:WTF is Righthaven (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:My view. (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell? If you have permission, you have permission and it isn't a copyright violation.
Re:Quoting for the purpose of refuting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Because we say so" (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Issue with linking to an ever-changing site... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with simply linking to a site that's hosting an article is that file organization systems change and old articles are either archived (sometimes behind a paywall) or simply purged. If an article is particularly important to a cause (evidence of a particular opinion of a group of people in a specific area at a specific time), then it would seem that, for posterity sake, the article can at least be partially re-posted on another site with a link to the direct source.
It reminds of the the "out-of-print" book issue. Writer Bob writes a book. It's published and distributed. Demand for the book wanes, Bob dies, and the publisher pulps surplus stock. If someone wants to buy the book, s/he has to dig through used book stores or the like and, if the book is ever found, pay a premium for a book that is no longer in print. The reader just wants the content, not a collector's item... and yet it's not exactly legal to acquire the content without purchasing the rights from the publisher.
Re:Quoting for the purpose of refuting (Score:1, Insightful)
The parent post claims that it's imposible to refute a work within the bound of copyright law. As evedenced by this statment.
One of the stupidest aspects of copyright "law" is this:
You can't quote to refute a work.
(Slashdot, 11/24/2010, line 1-2)
The specific claim being made is that the best refutation would be a line by line rebuttal to a work quoted in its enteierty or near enough to violate copyright protection (line 3-5)
However I would argue that in that case you would quote the most important parts, and paraphraise the rest. Then you provide citations linking your quotes and paraphraised sections to the original. As A demonstration I have provided a quick example of the method in question in the form of this post. Since I have clearly quoted only a small portion of the original work, and have provided resonable citations I expect the resulting work of my own creation would pass for fair use were it to be questioned in court. This clearly contradicts the theis of the original post and inperticular the closing remark Which incidently is not itself substatioated in the original work:
Yet copyright "law" can be and is used to shut down debate
(line 5)
Re:WTF is Righthaven (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought we still had some notion of "Innocent til proven guilty" in this country. If we want to pretend to stick with that, then saying to the plaintiffs "Show me that they actually did something wrong by explaining to my satisfaction why this isn't fair use" is exactly the right and fair approach.
Re:This is black letter law (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Because we say so" (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Issue with linking to an ever-changing site... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is you can't maintain links. The material the link points to can change or be removed entirely, which creates a problem. If I criticize someone's positions or evidence in their article, they can change the article and smear me for having lied about what they said and I can't prove a thing. The only way I can prove they said what I say they said is to make my own copy of their article, one that they can't change, and serve it up off my own servers alongside my commentary on it. And I may need to show the entirety as a defense against claims that I'm cherry-picking statements of theirs and taking them out of context. My only defense against that is to show enough of the article to show that no I'm not taking isolated statements out of context, and that may well be the entirety of the article.
Re:"Because we say so" (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't think that matters. Wouldn't the payment they can get for licensing it back to the newspaper depend on the ad revenue it could get? If it can't get much ad revenue, they can't license it for much.
Of course the newspaper already paid them for *this particular* article, and they can't lose this preexisting payment, only future payments for future articles, but that would be like a situation where the newspaper did own the article and you tried to claim that the advertisers already paid them for the ads and they only lose revenue for future ads.
Re:Issue with linking to an ever-changing site... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the problem. The solution is to write your own article, or to maintain your links.
Or, purchase rights to the work. The work is copyrighted, and you want to copy it. It's really quite simple. The owner will, very likely, sell you rights, at least if they are a publishing house.
I do that all the time for images that I use in my business-related presentations. For most copyrighted work that is owned by a company of some sort, it is relatively straightforward to approach their business development people and strike a deal. Usually this is as easy as finding the right page on their web site, making a selection of content and rights levels, and typing in your credit card number. At the worst, it's making a single phone call. No, it isn't free, and no, I don't think it should be. But most copyrighted work isn't the Obama HOPE portrait or a Pulitzer winning investigative essay, and so the prices are reasonable, at least in my experience.
Re:WTF is Righthaven (Score:4, Insightful)
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.