Troll protection
And not the annoying internet kind, the far larger PITA lawyer kind.
<!--QuoteBegin-wired.com+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (wired.com)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Founded in March, the Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post, or even excerpt, those articles without permission. The company has settled about 60 of 160 cases for a few thousand dollars each, and plans to expand its operations to other newspapers across the country.
Many of its lawsuits arise, not from articles posted by a website’s proprietors, but from comments and forum posts by the site’s readers. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website enjoys effective immunity from civil copyright liability for user content, provided they, promptly remove infringing material at the request of a rightsholder. That’s how sites like YouTube are able to exist, and why Wired.com allows users to post comments to our stories without fear that a single user’s cut-and-paste will cost us $150,000 in court.
But to dock in that legal safe harbor, a site has to, among other things, register an official contact point for DMCA takedown notices, a process that involves filling out a form and mailing a check to the government. An examination of Righthaven’s lawsuits targeting user content suggests it’s specifically going after sites that failed to fill out that paperwork.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loophole/" target="_blank">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/d...haven-loophole/</a>
<!--QuoteBegin-wired.com+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (wired.com)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Founded in March, the Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post, or even excerpt, those articles without permission. The company has settled about 60 of 160 cases for a few thousand dollars each, and plans to expand its operations to other newspapers across the country.
Many of its lawsuits arise, not from articles posted by a website’s proprietors, but from comments and forum posts by the site’s readers. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website enjoys effective immunity from civil copyright liability for user content, provided they, promptly remove infringing material at the request of a rightsholder. That’s how sites like YouTube are able to exist, and why Wired.com allows users to post comments to our stories without fear that a single user’s cut-and-paste will cost us $150,000 in court.
But to dock in that legal safe harbor, a site has to, among other things, register an official contact point for DMCA takedown notices, a process that involves filling out a form and mailing a check to the government. An examination of Righthaven’s lawsuits targeting user content suggests it’s specifically going after sites that failed to fill out that paperwork.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loophole/" target="_blank">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/d...haven-loophole/</a>
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