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Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010 | 2:05 a.m.
Las Vegas newspaper copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC sued five more website operators Tuesday, alleging infringements of Las Vegas Review-Journal material.
Despite national media coverage of the Righthaven lawsuits filed since March, which now total at least 151, Tuesday’s lawsuits indicate there are still plenty of bloggers and webmasters around North America who haven’t received word that posting Review-Journal material online without authorization could result in a lawsuit.
Righthaven is a company that detects online infringements of Review-Journal material, obtains copyrights to that material from the Review-Journal’s owner, Stephens Media LLC, and then typically sues the alleged infringers without warning.
An affiliate of Stephens Media’s parent company has invested in Righthaven, which the Review-Journal says is a technology company working to protect Review-Journal copyrights. Some defense attorneys and critics, however, call Righthaven a frivolous lawsuit and settlement shakedown operation.
As in all its recent lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court for Nevada, Righthaven demands damages of $150,000 apiece and forfeiture of the website domain names from these new defendants:
• Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Building Association and Walt Schmidt, associated with the Ohio-based union’s ble-t.org website.
• The Second Amendment Foundation in Bellevue, Wash., and an official there, Keeva Segal, who are associated with the publication Women & Guns and the website womenshooters.com.
• Garry Newman, associated with the website facepunch.com.
• Scott Arpajian, associated with the website idisappoint.com
• James Matthews and Las Vegas-based Muscle Cars of America, associated with the website musclecarsofamerica.com
Matthews’ website is accused of displaying an Aug. 27 Review-Journal story about the Shelby American Speed Shop in Las Vegas. Court records indicate the Review-Journal received credit for the post on the Muscle Cars website in the form of a tagline.
“The defendants did not seek permission, in any manner, to reproduce, display, or otherwise exploit the work (story),” Righthaven’s lawsuit against Matthews alleges. “The defendants were not granted permission, in any manner, to reproduce, display, or otherwise exploit the work.”
Efforts to reach the new defendants for comment were not immediately successful.
Separately, Righthaven reached at least two more confidential settlements with earlier defendants. These bring to at least 51 the number of settled Righthaven cases.
The latest settlements were reached with:
• Andre McCollough
• Grant N. Grand and Florida Oil Spill Law
Chunky says:
Thanks to Mr. Green for keeping this story out there. It's become a bit repetitive but someone needs to shut down Righthaven and punish them for their aggressive tactics of shaking down individuals and small businesses who can't defend themselves.
That's what Chunky thinks!
Righthaven are going to look really stupid if they supply a RSS feed. I wonder if they are short of cash and are using these lawsuits as a cheap way to make a few bucks.
RSS Feeds
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a means of distributing content between a content provider and any number of platform-independent clients, such as blogs, Web sites or desktop "feed" readers. We encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feeds and interact with our content off this Web site. Please see the User Agreement for acceptable use of our content.
The stories are repetitively ghastly Chunky!
Go EFF go! Massive kudos to Field and Stream, Internet Brands and other corporations and individuals who have the financial means to take on Righthaven & company!
JohnGJ....LVRJ has RSS feeds. It feeds the title, short burb, and a link back to the original story.
All that is fair use and Righthaven can't sue for that.
But if you copy and paste all or a significant part of copyright LVRJ material without permission and post it on your own site then Righthaven can sue you for that.
The Sun just does not care if you copy and paste. Plus their own lawyers say it is A-OK to do so.
No Idle Time in this Devil's Workshop.
Righthaven, what a downright slimy company. Disgusting.
Anyone have the names of the lawyers involved with Righthaven?
The law profession is full of pimps.
Wasn't there a case among the 151+ where they copied just 4 paragraphs of a total of 30 and still were sued? It doesn't matter with these guys. Fair use or not, they prey on people.
It's about to get serious
"Wasn't there a case among the 151+ where they copied just 4 paragraphs of a total of 30 and still were sued? It doesn't matter with these guys. Fair use or not, they prey on people."
According to the Sun's own stated policy, that would be copyright infringement if one copied 4 paragraphs out of a total of 30.
The law says if one copies all or a significant portion of copyright material and post it on their own site then that is copyright infringement.
Many sites, including the LVRJ and the Sun, have stated policies on how much they consider that can be copied and pasted and still be fair use.
Righthaven probably is standing on solid ground on this but of course the judical system can rule differently.