Do NOT quote the Las Vegas Review-Journal
Show your support:
"Patent trolls" were bad enough. Now there are "copyright trolls," and one in particular is suing anyone who has quoted content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. One
gun-rights website has shut down as a result.
On July 21st, The Armed Citizen received an indirect and informal notice of a lawsuit against this website and its owners, David Burnett and Clayton Cramer.
The suit, reportedly filed in US District Court on July 20th, alleges that The Armed Citizen and its owners “willfully copied” and infringed on original source content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
According to news reports, Righthaven LLC has filed lawsuits against no less than 80 other political websites and individual blogs for “infringement.”
Wired reports:
Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.
...Now he’s talking expansion. The Review-Journal’s publisher, Stephens Media in Las Vegas, runs over 70 other newspapers in nine states, and Gibson says he already has an agreement to expand his practice to cover those properties.
...Gibson says he’s just getting started. Righthaven has other media clients that he won’t name until the lawsuits start rolling out, he says.
They're not acknowledging "fair use" as a defense, so limiting your quotes to 75 words or less won't prevent you from being sued. (It might help you win the lawsuit, but who wants the expense?) Therefore, we have removed from this site the one small quotation from the LVRJ, and we've pulled all LVRJ news links from ifeminists.com. And we have adopted a policy to
never use any LVRJ content henceforth. If more of these "submarine" clients are revealed, we'll pull their content, too.
If you run a website or blog, I strongly advise you to do likewise.
Brad - Monday 26 July 2010 - 09:18:39 -
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