About Time We get Some GOOD RIGHTHAVEN NEWS!!!

Righthaven loses second fair use ruling over copyright lawsuits

By Steve Green

Friday, March 18, 2011

An Oregon nonprofit did not infringe on copyrights when it posted without authorization an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal story on its website, a judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge James Mahan said during a hearing he planned to dismiss, on fair use grounds, a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against the Center for Intercultural Organizing (CIO), in Portland, Ore.

The lawsuit was filed last year by Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas, the Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner that also enforces copyrights for the Denver Post.

Mahan, who last year raised the fair use issue in the CIO case without being prodded to do so by CIO attorneys, said the copyright lawsuit would be dismissed because the nonprofit used it in an educational way, the CIO didn’t try to use the story to raise money and because the story in question was primarily factual as opposed to being creative.

The judge also found there was no harm to the market for the story.

“The market (served by the CIO) is not the R-J’s market,” Mahan said.

Mahan also found Righthaven’s use of the copyright for a lawsuit gives the copyright less protection than if the Review-Journal were using it in the normal course of delivering the news.

“Here the copyright has been removed from its original context,” Mahan said.

“Righthaven is not using the copyright the same way the R-J used it. Righthaven is using it to support a lawsuit,” Mahan said.

This type of copyright use has a chilling effect on free speech and doesn’t advance a purpose of the federal Copyright Act, which is to encourage and protect creativity, Mahan said. ***READ MORE***

I LOVE IT!!!  Hows that working out for you there Lamda Lamda Lamda?

Read this article here at WIRED.COM if you dont know about Righthaven…

 

ALERT!!! WE Will DISAPPEAR IF YOU DO NOT STEP UP!!!

Book Burning in the Digital Age…and so it begins

MAINSTREAM MEDIA REVIEW

msmreview.blogspot.com

July 25, 2010

The battle of the copyright is a long and sordid tale on the internet. Most folks are familiar with the old days of Napster, and the record companies suing the pants off of soccer-Moms because their kids had downloaded songs to the family computer. More recently as technology has continued to advance, we have seen movie companies also come into the fold along with the music companies, often suing to shut down websites that host torrent files of copyrighted material, as well as still going after the individual on occasion. At the end of the day though, most folks aren’t overly concerned about those issues. Music and movies are creative expressions and public past-times for the most part, not exactly a priority in this day and age. It all sounds like a lot of hair-splitting over profits that no one really wants to be bothered with. Sure artists are entitled to make money from their work. But at the same time, when someone shells out $20 for a CD that has one good song on it, it’s clearly a rip-off scheme by the recording industry too. A big ball of frustration and argument that is best left to the folks who have a vested interest in the fight. The whole debate has just soured many people to listening to music or watching movies at all. Easier just to flip on the radio or the TV and be done with it. Music and movies just aren’t much fun as a hobby anymore, which is probably a bigger reason for any perceived loss of revenue for these big companies than anything else. Some folks have just decided to grow up faster than we would have liked to, wistfully leaving pop-culture behind to focus on more important issues. Like freedom of speech, perhaps.

Now anyone who has had contact with American society in the past fifteen years or so has heard all about these copyright lawsuits, and has probably heard the argument that it is all “really about freedom of speech.” Most of us never really bought into that though. It wasn’t really about freedom of speech so much as buying a cable modem and ripping enough tracks to make a mix disc for the weekend, and to make it worth the money you were shelling out for the broadband connection. But as it turns out, these freedom-loving pirate pioneers might have had more insight than most of us ever gave them credit for. It’s not just about ripping a free copy of some crappy pop jam anymore. The debates over sharing content over the internet are no longer the frontier of internet free-speech. The goalposts have been on the move it seems.

In 1993 there were about 50 corporations that controlled just about all of the media in the United States. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the works. By 2004, we were down to only five corporations controlling it all.***CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE***

By doing nothing, you are allowing them to rollover FREE SPEECH!

If you do not defend your rights… They WILL BE TAKEN AWAY!!!