Craven Morehead

Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits | Threat Level | Wired.com

A lawyer is buying copyrights to newspaper articles then scouring the internet for blogs and forums that reproduce the content without permission. Once found, he then sues the site re-posting the article, up to $150,000 for a single article!!!!

Have fun mods!

Redlemon

Hey, could you post the full text of that article? I'm too lazy to click through...

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FuglyStick

Well, that sucks. While I can sympathize with publishers of original content for losing the click revenue, that lawyer sounds like quite the ambulance chaser.

This is why everyone thinks your profession is full of a bunch of douchebags, lawyers.

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Bill O'Rights

Well, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. But, I should think that as long as care is given to credit the original author...then douchebag lawyer can proceed to piss up a rope.

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roachboy

copyright is not about the author, really, any more than it is about the musicians in the context of recorded music. it's about controlling the intermediary, controlling the delivery system. academic databases pay very significant money to university publishers for the rights to index and/or display full text on their products. the authors never see a dime of it. in theory academic writers operate in a symbolic capital economy, so what matters is that pieces get published and, indirectly, that they are cited (even as this is difficult to assess, the delrium that is bibliometrics notwithstanding) and they get paid indirectly, through promotions and/or speaking gigs etc. in fact, that system is a farce in a number of ways, particularly when you line it up against the nature of the academic labor market over the past decade--but that it's administrators of journals and university publishers that make all the money from rights fits perfectly in with that labor market profile. but i digress.

it doesn't particularly surprise me that righthaven's initial contract was with the unlv law journal and that their gig was to sue people who were using material owned by the journal without paying. by using here it could mean authors who decide to put their own work up on a free-access website to make it more widely available---which is more likely than any napster-y thing (though pirate e-libraries are certainly out there---and more power to them.)

righthaven is all about the cash, though. they don't give a shit about any matter of pinciple that might be involved with the distribution of information, the conflicts between proprietary claims and democracy, say, even as shallow a democracy as the american version, which relies on the free circulation of information.

righthaven sues people straight away and hopes to settle out of court.

the wired article is a commerical for these assholes.

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raging moderate

Well all that is is a guy who's figured out a way to make a bunch of money by screwing people. that's pretty much the American way isn't it?

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