Saturday, November 20, 2010

NV: Righthaven will stop copyright lawsuits over news excerpts

These guys were shaping up to be a real threat to bloggers as bloggers often use news excerpts. But they have now beat a major retreat
"Copyright troll Righthaven this week promised to narrow its lawsuit campaign in the face of a courtroom defeat, when a judge ruled that a real estate website made “fair use” of a newspaper article from the Las Vegas-Review Journal.

Righthaven is the lawyer-heavy company based in Las Vegas that sprang to life last spring for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that repost, or even excerpt, Las Vegas-Review Journal articles without permission. It has filed about 150 lawsuits, and settled dozens of them in its favor.

But the company reached a snag when the Realty One Group fought back, winning a summary dismissal weeks ago. A Nevada judge agreed with the real estate firm’s argument that eight of 30 sentences from a Review Journal story about the real estate market qualified as fair use of the material.

With that precedent set, Righthaven no longer plans to sue websites for posting brief excerpts of newspaper articles, the company told a different federal judge in a separate case this week.

Source

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yea but what about all those that paid $$$ to settle because they couldn't afford to fight it?

Anonymous said...

Let me just take a guess about this company that goes around suing everything in sight. Owned by jews? Hmm...