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This story is about "...Righthaven — a company formed last March to acquire the rights to newspaper articles, and then sue blogs and other websites that post or excerpt those articles."
"Copyright troll Righthaven is facing its second lawsuit from digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing a former federal prosecutor who tracks mysterious murder cases on his website.
Thomas DiBiase runs nobodycases.com, a site exclusively dedicated to tracking so-called “no body” cases, trials and investigations. A “no body case” is one in which a murder is suspected, but no body has been found.
In June, DiBiase posted a story from the Las Vegas Review-Journal about a Nevada man being sentenced to death for killing his wife who was never found. That put DiBiase in the crosshairs of Righthaven — a company formed last March to acquire the rights to newspaper articles, and then sue blogs and other websites that post or excerpt those articles.
The company has so far sued more than 160 defendants for cribbing articles from the Review-Journal, which is owned by Las Vegas-based Stephens Media. Righthaven’s lawsuit against DiBiase seeks $75,000 in damages and forfeiture of the nobodycases.com domain name."
Wired - EFF Defends Former Prosecutor From Righthaven Copyright Suit
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As a blogger whose entire blog is dedicated to excerpting and republishing pieces of articles in order to draw attention to issues, learning of groups like Righthaven makes me queasy.
Seems to be yet another element to the commoditisation of knowledge. A chill effect on free discourse.
Suing over 4 paragraphs of 34 seems a bit excessive to me.
So, in the interest of a future legal defence of this blog, I would certainly urge readers to read the sites I link to, and to pay special attention to the other site's advertising.
I don't have tens of thousands of dollars for any settlement...
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