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Thursday, March 24, 2011 | 4:51 p.m.
A column today on the Corporate Counsel/law.com website suggests The Associated Press is beefing up efforts for news creators to be paid for their work -- but in doing so won't be working with Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC.
After Righthaven started suing websites over alleged infringements involving Denver Post material, observers wondered if the AP would sign up for Righthaven's copyright protection service.
That's because William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP's board of directors, is also chairman and CEO of Denver Post owner MediaNews Group.
And in the past, Singleton has said the AP would step up efforts to battle misappropriation of its work.
Today's Corporate Counsel report on law.com, by Andrew Goldberg, says: "An AP lawyer who asked to remain anonymous says the news service is planning to follow a different path and preparing to launch its news licensing group later this year. The mission of the freestanding company, to be owned by the AP and other news organizations, is to help publishers sell their content to other media outlets and receive royalties based on where and how often that content (is) displayed."
This plan -- licensing of news content to gain royalty payments -- sounds similar to one already launched by Attributor Corp. attributor.com
Attributor in November released a study confirming infringements of news material online are rampant. In a five-month period, Attributor identified more than 400,000 unlicensed uses of news content on 44,906 sites from 70,101 online news articles.
Attributor said it tested a "graduated response" method with websites posting unlicensed content.
Some 75 percent of the sites complied with the rights holders' requests to pursue licensing deals or take down the material, Attributor said. This was without resorting to content takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or Righthaven-like lawsuits.
Do you think Righthaven suing AP subscribers had anything to do with this?
Righthaven has proved to be a loose cannon. Suing an AP affiliate may have been the last straw. Righthaven has not sued anyone over anything but the TSA photo for the last few months which may mean that is all they have left.
The TSA image was widely distributed using an AP copyright symbol. This needs to be investigated how and why this happened and why Righthaven is suing an AP affiliate when they may have been given some kind of permission to display the photo.
If anything it does show the amount of pressure put on Righthaven client papers is having an effect. SO far it has been contained to only the LVRJ that has already effectively been neutralized and the Denver Post but only this one image.
Righthaven is clearly in trouble.
How and why was the TSA image distributed by the AP and why the papers that printed it credited the AP and not the Denver Post? Why would Righthaven now sue a paper that printed this photo distributed by the AP if the Denver Post gave them permission? Or did they? So far no one has been able to explain this. This is a very serious matter because the distribution contributed to this image going viral. The Denver Post has some explaining to do on how the AP got this photo and if the AP had permission to distribute the Photo then why is an AP affiliate being sued and since the wide distribution of this photo encouraged it to go viral why did they sell the copyright to Righthaven to sue after it went viral?
http://righthavenvictims.blogspot.com/20...
Reichklaven can't do what they say they can do. They are incompetent. What is their revenue? Their profits?