Intellectual Property, Copyright Law And The Pursuit of Profit
No matter the law, no matter the regulation, there is always somebody ready to profit from it.
Take copyright law in the United States, and an ingenious plan to turn a profit from suing copyright 'violators'. Wired magazine's Threat Level blog has the story on this plan which could stop new media in its tracks :
"Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad.
Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money...
Gibson’s vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his client’s articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement — to compel quick settlements. Since Righthaven’s formation in March, the company has filed at least 80 federal lawsuits against website operators and individual bloggers who’ve re-posted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his first client."
This isn't just about copyright law. This is about censorship. This is about using a form of the law to remove content, to force new media makers and bloggers to take down content from their sites and pay newspapers for the right to spread information. That will affect websites based in North America and anywhere else in the English-speaking world.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering to help those being targeted by Righthaven. They are already starting to fight back against this use of copyright law. Perhaps they'll see results.
Walker Morrow is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.
