Copyright infringement and fair use, the Communication Decency Act, defamation, privacy and anonymity are just a few of the issues all online publishers must be aware of, because as the saying goes, “ignorance is no protection against the law.’
Everyone should be aware that scrapping content from someone else’s website is illegal – it is not ‘black hat’ it is illegal. But unless you are Righthaven LLC which has been involved in 173 lawsuits and received an estimated $255,500 in settlements, according to RightHavenLawsuits.com. Most of the suits involved copyright infringement of stories from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the list of the defendants is impressive including NORML (National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws) and the Nevada Democratic Party – both of whom settled.
Righthaven has been called ‘parasitic bottom feeder‘ and ‘copyright enforcer‘, but it is their excess that has the Electronic Frontier Foundation offering to help Righthaven defendants.
“Righthaven, founded in March of 2010, files hundreds of copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of newspaper publishers against bloggers who make use of news content without permission. To that end, Righthaven searches the internet for stories and parts of stories from the newspapers that they represent. Once they find content that has been re-published, Righthaven purchases the copyright to the article and sues the owner of the blog,” EFF announced.
Those three sentences would possibly have me in the Righthaven net if EFF was a client. And that is where the battle lines are drawn. The defense is not against site scrappers, but what is termed “fair use.” Without fair use many news stories would not get written and the traffic to the originating publishers would be greatly diminished. The newspaper industry is having major problems dealing with the free nature of the web which is another story – but the have complained about their content being used beyond what would be considered ‘fair use.”
“The doctrine of fair use developed over the years as courts tried to balance the rights of copyright owners with society’s interest in allowing copying in certain, limited circumstances. This doctrine has at its core a fundamental belief that not all copying should be banned, particularly in socially important endeavors such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research,” Bitlaw.com explains.
In one of Righthaven’s suits the defendant used 5 sentences in a news report – that one was dismissed, . Interestingly, there is also a case Righthaven requested the court to drop, after the EFF served Righthaven with a “with an answer and counter claim saying the post at issue was protected by the fair use doctrine of copyright law and accusing the Review-Journal and Righthaven of abusing copyright law by trying to intimidate defendants into settling what critics call frivolous, no-warning lawsuits,” the Las Vegas Sun reported. There was the possibility if Righthaven lost the suit they could have been liable for the EFF attorney fees.
The suits issued were generally for $150,000 and the handing over of the offending domains. Given many of the defendants were small companies or individuals settlements were worked out for between $2,000 to $5,000.
Those tactics sound a little familiar? Let’s discuss the Communication Decency Act and that scourge of the search results Ripoff Report. The CDA was started in an effort to fight online pornography and children’s access to indecent content. Howver, freedom of speech advocates fought some of it and the act was changed dramatically.
But it did have Section 230 added to the original act which included “protection for online service providers and users from actions against them based on the content of third parties, stating in part that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” Wikipedia notes.
It was this addition that allowed Ripoff Report to keep content submitted by anonymous posters that falsely criticized and defamed businesses and individuals. Google ranked some of these very high in their rankings and created a situation where the businesses and individuals were hurt financially.
“Ripoff Report is a website that allows users to post reports about individuals and companies that they believe have “ripped them off” or treated them unfairly. The website has attracted much criticism and litigation for refusing to remove allegedly false reports and offering a service to aggrieved businesses called the “Corporate Advocacy Program” (“CAP”), under which, for a fee, the website will investigate “rip-off” reports targeting member companies and post prominent rebuttals to those reports” the Citizen Media Law Project stated.
If this content were to be edited then the website would lose the coverage of the CDA, as they would have been involved in the selection of the material published. There is no denying an online consumer watch dog is needed, but the use of a law to take money to counter false statements is an issue that the government needs to address.
A suit was brought against Yelp – the online review site, for their employees asking for monthly payments to remove bad reviews. “The suit hinges on the question of whether Yelp is simply offering to run a positive advertisement above negative reviews, or whether it is further offering to remove negative reviews for cash, which could in court amount to payoffs to prevent the site from doing future harm – a.k.a. extortion” Inc. Magazine stated.
So online publishers beware. If you allow third party comments, you cannot edit them if you want to be covered under the CDA for any defamatory comments.
Privacy is another issue publishers should know something about. Even Google has been forced to provide information of users who “posted denigrating comments and unauthorized videos” on YouTube, the Associated Press reported. When they are done anonymously there may be problems and your hosting company may have to help, but remember ignorance is no excuse.
As Richard Bernstein of the New York Times notes: “Anonymous sources are of course among the newspaper reporter’s best friends, without whom the cause of informing the public would be severely set back. But anonymity is also a tremendous aid to the resentful, the scandalous and the cowardly, and the signs are that the tidal of wave of anonymous comment made possible by the Internet is getting even bigger”.
The Online Media Legal Network held the conference – Journalism’s Digital Transition: Unique Legal Challenges and Opportunities – earlier this year and are sharing the videos from the various sessions. I strongly recommend online publishers taking the time to watch them. May take some time as they are not 30 minute sessions, but work your way through them.
The OMLN also offers free legal assistance to online publishers so it may be a site you want to bookmark just in case.
Finally, another article. Kudos on the post! I still check your site from time to time ; )
Nice article. Copyright is important on the web. In the UK we have seen people taken to court and fined by the likes of Getty Images due to the fact that they used images on their web site which were licensed. What is important is that as a client you must get an assurance from your web designer/developer that any library images are actually under the right licence for public viewing. In addition to this it has been brought to our attention that several UK companies are using OSWD.org open source templates and not offering credits to the original designer. This again is a major no-no.
You can report these sites on ripoff.com but the upshot is that if you are caught using a template designed by someone else then copyright theft comes in to play. Not a great thing at all!