Constitutional Law

Company rebuts fair-use defense in newspaper copyright suit

By By The Associated Press

LAS VEGAS ? A company suing websites on behalf of the owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal says an Oregon nonprofit that helps immigrants isn't exempt from copyright laws.

Righthaven LLC said in documents filed last week in U.S. District Court that the Center for Intercultural Organizing was wrong to post a story from the newspaper without authorization, the Las Vegas Sun reported.

"A defendant's nonprofit status or educational motive does not somehow provide a blanket exemption from liability for infringement," attorneys for Righthaven said in court documents.

Lawyers for the nonprofit argue the post qualifies for a "fair use" exemption and didn't hurt the Review-Journal. They say visitors to the nonprofit's website go there for immigration news, not for Nevada news covered by the newspaper.

A professor of law from the University of California, Berkeley, said in a friend-of-the-court brief that the Review-Journal encouraged the posting by suggesting readers share its news online. Jason Schultz, co-director of the university's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, said the nonprofit's use of the article didn't cannibalize the market for the Review-Journal's work.

"The Las Vegas Review-Journal elected to give the article away for free on the Internet and continues to do so to this day," Schultz said. "It is difficult to fathom a scenario in which the Las Vegas Review-Journal could have been harmed by [the nonprofit's] use. At most, the Las Vegas Review-Journal might have been deprived of a few pennies, but the law does not concern itself with such trifles."

Righthaven responded that the defendants are ignoring that the Review-Journal only lets users save or e-mail links back to the newspaper's website.

"Courts nationwide have repeatedly rejected the proposition that the use of a copyrighted work is fair because said use might somehow increase the demand for the plaintiff's work," Righthaven's attorneys said. "The defendants' wishful contention in this regard also fails to account for the possibility that readers may be diverted from the work's original source publication as a result of the infringement's availability on the (nonprofit's) website."

The suit is one of nearly 200 filed by Righthaven in Las Vegas against website operators as part of a campaign to police the sharing of news content.

Full post as published by First Amendment Center on December 27, 2010 (boomark / email).