The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Looks like he agreed to settle with Righthaven. I can’t blame him, since it’s honestly the cheapest option, and not all of us have the cash for a big legal battle. Most of us don’t, in fact. It seems to me the damage Righthaven suffered is at most small claims material, yet they manage to get into federal court because of the fantastic copyright claim.
The real problem is copyright law, which in the age of the Internet we need less of, yet Congress has been going in the opposite direction.
I guess I should find out, and report back. I’ve been so out of it, I haven’t even really been paying attention to e-mail. Obama could have ordered house-to-house confiscation, and I doubt I’d have realized. Definitely haven’t been reading blogs. Many thanks to my guest bloggers for helping fill in for me while I was gone. Normal blogging will resume as soon as I figure out what I’ve been missing.
But one story I will link to is from Marko, and I have to say, after that long flight back from Hawaii, bravo. My parents took the same approach, and even when we were older, it was mostly Imperial Pizza for the family. No fancy places for us.
According to a story in Wired, Righthaven LLC has expanded their copyright trolling operation to another newspaper chain. The WEHCO Media chain of newspapers has been added to the target list for Righthaven’s trolls.
WEHCO Media is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas and co-owns Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC with Stephens Media. WEHCO owns the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette which is the largest newspaper in the state and the 43rd largest by circulation in the U.S.
A list of their newspaper holdings and a brief history of the company can be found on No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money.
The Power of Epsilon. If there’s one thing I think we need in the gun blogosphere, it’s more math geeks. No, I’m serious. This is why:
It’s hard to describe what it is about this comment that irritated me. Part of it is the statistician in me, annoyed at the misuse of statistics in an attempt to prove a claim that has been discredited over and over again.
When the other side argues statistics, it’s nice to have a statistician in your back pocket to call on. Of course, arguing with MikeB is about as productive as smashing bricks against your head repeatedly, but attacking MikeB is probably a reasonably smart way to start a blog out. Guaranteed to bring commenters, especially if he shows up.
He notes that he won’t strictly be a gun blog. That’s probably smart too. It’s getting tough to write about guns regularly. All this economic meltdown means people don’t pay as much attention to gun issues. That’s probably good for the movement, but not so much for people who talk about it.
Clayton is saying he’s going to fight the Righthaven lawsuit, and is looking for donations to help with legal costs. Please kick him some money if you have some to spare. I donated back when this started, and when I stop hemorrhaging money planning a Hawaii trip at the end of the summer, I’ll kick him some more. I think it’s very important for the blogging community as a whole that someone stands up to these people, in their abuse of process. It could be any of us, and shutting down these forms of nasty lawsuits will benefit everyone.
UPDATE: Righthaven is filing five more suits.
UPDATE: The defendants, including Clayton, speak out in the Las Vegas Sun.
These Righthaven folks are nuts. Apparently they are suing someone with mafia connections now. I am pleased to report there are no further links to Steven’s Media sources on this blog. I wrote a script to check.
If you have a WordPress blog, and access to a machine with a command line, feel free to use my script yourself to check your blog. This is currently set up to check my own blog, but it should work for any WordPress blog with some minor tweaking. Probably even a non-Wordpress blog too if you changed around the search strings.
I do not believe we should remove links out of fear, but because these folks, by their actions, have shown they do not understand the Internet, or how to decently try to resolve copyright disputes. They are asking to be endarkened, and I don’t see any reason not to oblige them. I’m not going to support these shakedown artists with traffic, and I would ask other bloggers to join.
Hat tip to Joe Huffman for putting together the blacklist
Some interesting commentary from an IP lawyer on the whole Righthaven thing. He doesn’t think their business model is viable either, and they won’t likely have any more success than RIAA did with their lawsuits. My main beef with Righthaven is not so much that they are defending their copyrights, but that they immediately resorted to a lawsuit without first trying to resolve the issue decently.
I would certainly hope if a copyright holder thinks I’ve gone over the Fair Use line, he or she at least has the decency to talk to me about it before slapping me with a lawsuit. I’d even take a Cease and Desist letter as being relatively polite in this regard.
Because Stevens Media LLC has decided to expand its relationship with Righthaven, I am blacklisting them. John Richardson has published a list of all Stevens Media holdings, for those interested in making sure they don’t get what ought not to be coming to them (traffic).
They pretty much admit it. Here’s the Wired article speaking about how they are pretty much buying up newspaper content in order to sue bloggers:
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.
Wired notes that the Recording Industry Association of America tried a similar tactic, and did not reap the rewards they had hoped. If you look at their business model, it breaks down if people stand up to them. The amounts they can reasonably claim are much smaller than what RIAA or the MPAA could claim. If 1000 people download a movie from you, that’s 20,000 dollars in damages. But what is the amount of money a paper makes off a single article in advertising? The amount for a few months can’t be more than a couple of hundred bucks for a really popular article.
Any newspaper adopting this tactic is going to lose out. If Stevens Media is really serious about cozying up to Righthaven, then fine — I already have Bitter searching through my archives to ensure that any links to their papers are removed, and I will blacklist them for the future. The Internet doesn’t work this way, guys. You have a right to protect your copyrights, and to prevent verbatim reproduction of your work, but one should do that with an strong eye toward fair-use, toward treating bloggers as reasonable people who don’t want to abuse someone’s copyright, and with an even stronger eye toward the PR implications of being bozos. In most cases, the minor amount you’re losing from advertising isn’t worth destroying good will among a community that’s capable of sending significant traffic, and thus advertising revenue, your way.
This is a shame. Not that I can blame him. It’s a lot to ask someone to take on that kind of legal risk for no financial reward.
It was probably only a matter of time before this happened. Clayton Cramer and David Burnett of The Armed Citizen, are being sued by the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Today, The Armed Citizen received informal notice in the form of a media inquiry about a lawsuit against this website and its owners, David Burnett and Clayton Cramer. The lawsuit, reportedly filed in US District Court on July 20th, alleges that The Armed Citizen and its owners “willfully copied” original source content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
You can find the suit here. The Armed Citizen is a great chronicle of stories from around the country of people defending themselves with a gun. They do take donations, so please go kick in a few bucks to help with legal expenses. This is something that could happen to any of us.
UPDATE: I had about four links, and a few brief excerpts of a sentence or two on this blog from the Review-Journal. They have been removed. Not out of any far of lawsuit, because they clearly fall under fair-use, but because it would seem the Review-Journal does not wish to be linked, or be talked about. Fair enough. They can rot alone in a dark corner of the Internet where no one goes. That’s the bed they made, and they can sleep in it. They will receive no more links from this blog.