LEFTARD MEDIA OUTLET SUES DISABLED VETERAN

Jim Robinson on left in wheelchair pictured with Steve Forbes in 1999.

Las Vegas Review-Journal Sues Disabled Vet

Posted by The Rational Right on Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Imagine for a moment your grandmother creating a blog to talk about her gardening. One of her friends leaves a comment on her blog with a news article about gardens in her area. Sounds innocent enough? Actions like this happen every second on the Internet.

Now imagine the news source in the comment suddenly, without warning, suing your grandmother for the comment left on her blog, demanding high monetary compensation and possibly even control of her blog.

Incidents like this happen all the time. The latest targets of these types of lawsuits include Jim Robinson, a disabled veteran, and his website FreeRepublic.com. Free Republic is one of the oldest Conservative news discussion forums on the Internet. It is also non-commercial, relying on donations from members to keep the lights on. At Free Republic, members of the public can post and discuss news articles and most of these member’s identities remain anonymous. One of these anonymous members posted a news article from the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal without the awareness that this publication has contracted with Righthaven LLC to track down and file lawsuits against anyone who posts articles from their website. According to the Las Vegas Sun, over 70 such lawsuits have been filed by Righthaven on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal since the first of the year, many against small blogs or, like the Free Republic incident, against forums whose anonymous members have posted articles.

According to postings at Free Republic, the owner never received a take-down request, and if he had, would have removed the articles immediately. Free Republic has been very vigilant in providing members “no post” or “excerpt only” lists of publications that wish to limit distribution of their material. Unfortunately for Free Republic and countless other websites, notification of the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s request seems to have come in the form of a lawsuit with no prior notification of their wishes or any take-down notification as required by the safe harbor act of the DMCA.

To complicate matters even further, all article pages at the Las Vegas Review-Journal include links encouraging members to share the content on social networking sites. These links share the title and URL of the article, but provide little guidance to the average person, of what they are or aren’t allowed to post. In the context of the massive amount of lawsuits filed by Righthaven and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, one could come to an opinion that this may be more of a revenue scheme versus legitimately protecting copyrights.

We strongly believe in the protection of one’s intellectual property and respecting copyrights, however, in this day and age of social media, the line of what can be shared versus protected is rarely clear. Luckily for blogs and other website owners, the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA and case law such as Viacom v. YouTube provide protections to citizens from these unclear judgments.

For groups like Righthaven, I’m sure the hope is that a majority of these small websites don’t fight but instead seek to hand over a monetary settlement. What is needed, however, is for any number of these sites to stand up and say “enough” of these predatory practices.

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