I find three definitions of the term ‘barratry’ when I look it up – two of them are obscure, but the third is relevant, and if stretched a bit, can apply to the current blogosphere kerfuffle-du-jour – the Righthaven violation of copyright lawsuits. Well, that’s the politer term; a quick internet search on ‘righthaven’ also turned up qualifiers such as ‘trolling’, ‘extortion,’ ‘bottom-feeders’ and ‘barratrious a**holes.’ A more thorough search would, I am certain, turn up more pungent terms of abuse and a fair collection of lawyer jokes. (Sample – what’s brown and black and looks good on a lawyer? Answer – a Doberman.) Suffice to say, I went through five or six pages of google-search results before finding a single link to a post which made a feeble attempt at defending Righthaven’s practices – of searching out instances of copyright infringement on the part of bloggers and news aggregators and without warning, or demanding credit and a link to the original story – suing the bee-jezzus out of the proprietor – usually small enthusiast bloggers without deep pockets or institutional support. Adding fresh insult, Righthaven LLC also demands that the domain name of the offending website or blog be turned over to them, as well as fairly substantial payments. Yes, copying someone elses’ work off a website or blog and posting it on your own and taking credit for it. Quel tacky, and plagiaristic, and someone doing it probably richly deserves being served with a complaint, a cease-and-desist order, or just hunted down, smeared with honey and staked out over a fire-ant nest.
However: is posting the story with a link to the original source, with a plainly posted credit – is that plagiarism as well? What about a paragraph excerpt, or the ‘three line’ fair-use standard, with a link, a credit and a recommendation such as “Read this!” A discussion group, with members posting excerpts, and links and talking about it? Is that a violation of copyright also? What about just a link . . . urm, through those little news feed dinguses at the bottom of the page. A Facebook recommendation? News aggregate sites consist of constantly updated pages of all these variants, with links to the new, the weird, the newsworthy or just plain interesting, from a variety of sources, large, small, official, unofficial, regular media or whatever. Even blogs like my main blog which focuses on original writing – I’ve occasionally posted interesting links. Linking, promoting, tweeting and favoriting interesting stories has been the lifeblood of the blogosphere as I have known it for yea these many years; advantageous linkage is beneficial to bloggers and websites alike, guaranteeing a larger and wider audience than the unlinked story or post might have had. But the way that L’affiare Righthaven is shaping up, it appears that all of the above may open up liability among news aggregate and commentary blogs for legal action from the ‘barratrious a**holes.’
The Righthaven law firm has entered into a professional alliance with an enterprise called Stephens Media Group, which owns a number of local newspapers across the southern and western states. One of their publications is based in Las Vegas, a city large enough to generate a fair amount of national-interest news – and it appears that bloggers who excerpted or linked to stories from that particular newspaper over the last few years are now providing a rich harvest of copyright lawsuits brought by Righthaven. Righthaven’s method of operation appears to be either to search out those posted and linked stories, and obtain the copyright for the story from Stephens Media, or to have had the copyright in their sweaty little hand all along before filing suit. Give them credit – Righthaven has figured out how to monetize the blogosphere, and Stephens Media has figured out how to extract a few more bucks from their newspaper holdings. For now, at least – until bloggers and news aggregate sites begin acting on the principle that any content in any Stephens Media newspapers is about as toxic as radioactive sewer sludge. While a fair number of bloggers and websites have paid up just to make it all go away, others are fighting back by either ‘Righthaven-proofing’ their sites, or blacklisting Stephens Media through their site-posting rules. There are even Firefox and Chrome plug-ins to automatically exclude Stephens Media from your internet browser. Righthaven and Stephens Media may perhaps gain in the short run, but prospects for long-term gain seem pretty iffy.
Rantburg, my own favorite one-stop website for all things sarky and WOT-related, is one of those sites being sued. They are taking donations. A blog which lists the websites being sued is here.
I first learned of this in late July, when a message board I belong to was discussing how TheArmedCitizen.com got hit with one of these lawsuits. They’re fighting it as well. The item in question was “4 paragraphs that were properly attributed and linked back to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.”
I’ll say one thing for Righthaven – they strike across the board, even suing the Democratic National Committee of Nevada.
It’s important to remember that plagiarism is an academic credibility issue.
What Righthaven is suing over is copyright; and you can trivially violate copyright even if you correctly attribute, because it’s a matter of their legal control over the material. (Which is why it’s illegal to re-print a copyrighted book without permission, even when it’s attributed to the author.)
The problem with “fair use” is, as you imply, that there’s no clear standard for what counts outside of academia (which it’s pretty clear, at least).
Under the Copyright Office‘s guidelines (from the US Code), reprinting the whole thing with a link isn’t likely to have ever been fair use.
That bloggers have done such things for a while means only that they got into a bad habit around there.
(Though on the other hand it doesn’t affect the value of the “news” much, either, so there’s room for a defense, but it’s not clearly fair use to quote the whole thing or even most of it, just to make political commentary on something else.
Fisking, on the other hand, as a commentary on the piece itself, is probably protected.)
Righthaven has figured out how to monetize the blogosphere
Well… maybe. Except that trying to make big bucks by filing expensive lawsuits against people who typically don’t have much money doesn’t sound like a good business plan.
I believe there was a report on Slashdot a few weeks back about the RIAA’s results… millions spent on suits, resulting in thousands in payments. The plaintiffs have been coming out way behind on the whole thing.
I suspect this will turn out much the same way, but with a lot more negative publicity.
And, alas, several turnips will surely have all the blood squeezed out of them in the process.
Agreed, Eric – Righthaven (and possibly Stephens Media) may gain short-term, but in the long-term, this will bite them in the most horrible way possible – especially Stephens. I’ve already done the plug-in, lord knows how many other bloggers and readers have done so also. Linking through blogs and aggregate websites like Rantburg and Instapundit and all – that’s how to get wider coverage and a wider readership of your stuff … and you want to make yourself untouchable? Well, OK – maybe they have some business plan formulating that we internet peasants just can’t see. Love to know how it works – I don’t have any money, someone suing me would be lucky to get title to a cheap-ass house in a B-grade suburb and a 20 year old car.
Steven Gibson, Righthaven’s CEO has a personal webspace. If there is a doubt that webspace is actually his, visit righthaven.com registration page and pay attention to the e-mail on file.