EFF: Righthaven case ends in victory for fair use

[Winehole23]

In a victory for fair use, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Stephens Media, filed papers yesterday conceding that posting a short excerpt of a news article in an online forum is not copyright infringement. The concession will result in entry of a judgment of non-infringement in a long-running copyright troll case that sparked the dismissal of dozens of baseless lawsuits filed by Righthaven LLC.https://www.eff.org/press/releases/righthaven-case-ends-victory-fair-use

[Nbadan]

Woo hoo.....we can post 2 paragraphs of AP articles (with proper credit) again ....

[ChumpDumper]

Take that, Express-News!

[Winehole23]

After snatching a notorious copyright troll's name at auction, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com (http://righthaven.com/) into a web hosting service. The intended customers? Publishers worried about the kind of abusive legal threats spewed out by the domain's previous owner.

"The Swiss courts don't play games and registrars here cannot be scared," said Stefan Thalberg of Ort Cloud (http://www.ortcloud.ch/), an ISP based in Zürich. "Frivolous plaintiffs will find little comfort here."



With hosting in Switzerland and planned in Iceland, the new Righthaven promises "infrajuridsictional infrastructure" — in other words, uptime that would require international co-operation to bring down.
The announcement comes days after a fight over anti-piracy bills in Congress, described by opponents as a threat to free speech, culminated in websites shutting down in protest (http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/19/tech/sopa-blackouts/?hpt=hp_bn3).


Through a partnership with U.S.-based first amendment lawyers Marc Randazza (http://randazza.wordpress.com/) and Kenneth White (http://www.brownwhitelaw.com/attorneys/kwhite.html), the new Righthaven says it will be able to vigorously defend itself in American courtrooms--and protect its clients from those who abuse laws such as the DMCA to stifle criticism.
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/23/new-righthaven-offers-hosting.html

[Winehole23]

Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that failed in its attempt to make money for newspapers by suing readers for sharing stories online, was dealt a death blow Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit “all of” its intellectual property and other “intangible property” to settle its debts.


The order is an ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and websites that re-post newspaper articles or snippets of them without permission.


U.S. District Judge Philip M. Pro of Nevada ordered Righthaven to surrender for auction the 278 copyrighted news articles that were the subject of its lawsuits.


“The copyright registrations to more than 275 works are in Righthaven’s name, can be transferred by this court, and can then be auctioned,” the judge ruled (http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/03/show_temp.pl_.pdf). (.pdf)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/troll-forfeits-copyrights/