Moderators, you had better pin this one

[GST]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/copyright-trolling-for-dollars/

[HAWKSFAN89]

i'd like to fist fight this guy.

[IHeartAtlanta]

this dude has no life :beat:

[Plainview1981]

i'd like to fist fight this guy.

People like him are the reason the world is crumbling as we speak. It's reflective of just how greedy and spoiled people have become.

Just look at him.... He looks like a pasty faced Q____.

Well, you can fill in the blanks.

[Brokentree]

I hate to go against the flow but I more or less agree with this. The entire reposting of an article is just plain stealing. The article is posted on a site so that people go to that site and are annoyed by that sites advertisements. Its how they make money and its how they pay bills and its how they feed their children. Now if we're talking about links to articles with maybe a quote or two that is completely different. A link is free advertisment for their site. If funnels people to that site that would otherwise never see it. It creates hits and increases their revenue. Links=GOOD. Copy+Paste=BAD.

[niremetal]

I hate to go against the flow but I more or less agree with this. The entire reposting of an article is just plain stealing. The article is posted on a site so that people go to that site and are annoyed by that sites advertisements. Its how they make money and its how they pay bills and its how they feed their children. Now if we're talking about links to articles with maybe a quote or two that is completely different. A link is free advertisment for their site. If funnels people to that site that would otherwise never see it. It creates hits and increases their revenue. Links=GOOD. Copy+Paste=BAD.

I know lots of journalists. Not one of them cares if their writing is pirated. They don't get paid per "subscriber hit." They are paid either on salary or per article, and the more people read their stuff, the more exposure they get. As long as the byline is copied along with the rest, the only ones who really lose out on a copy/paste are the corporate owners. And even they aren't losing much, because it's not like people would pay $10/month for their sites in the absence of the copy/paste versions.

I also know lots of lawyers who think like Gibson. Trust me, they don't care about protecting the rights of the little freelance journalist trying to feed his family. Not one bit.

So in your/his honor:

Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits

By David Kravets

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/copyright-trolling-for-dollars/#ixzz0ukKIiqM8

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.

“We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.”

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.

Now he’s talking expansion. The Review-Journal’s publisher, Stephens Media in Las Vegas, runs over 70 other newspapers in nine states, and Gibson says he already has an agreement to expand his practice to cover those properties. (Stephens Media declined comment, and referred inquiries to Gibson.) Hundreds of lawsuits, he says, are already in the works by year’s end. “We perceive there to be millions, if not billions, of infringements out there,” he says.

Righthaven’s lawsuits come on the heels of similar campaigns targeting music and movie infringers. The Recording Industry Association of America sued about 20,000 thousand file sharers over five years, before recently winding down its campaign. And a coalition of independent film producers called the U.S. Copyright Group was formed this year, already unleashing as many as 20,000 federal lawsuits against BitTorrent users accused of unlawfully sharing movies.

The RIAA’s lawsuits weren’t a money maker, though — the record labels spent $64 million in legal costs, and recovered only $1.3 million in damages and settlements. The independent film producers say they nonetheless expect to turn a profit from their lawsuits.

“People are settling with us,” says Thomas Dunlap, the head lawyer of the Copyright Group’s litigation. The out-of-court settlements, the number of which he declined to divulge, are ranging in value from $1,500 to $3,500 — about the price it would cost defendants to retain a lawyer. The RIAA’s settlements, which it collected in nearly every case, were for roughly the same amounts.

But experts say that settling the Righthaven cases, many of which target bloggers or aggregation sites, might not be as easy. The RIAA lawsuits often accused peer-to-peer users of sharing dozens of music files, meaning the risk of going to trial was financially huge for the defendants.

The same is true of the BitTorrent lawsuits. The movie file sharers are accused of leeching and seeding bits of movie files, contributing to the widespread and unauthorized distribution of independent movies such as Hurt Locker, Cry of the Wolf and others.

But each of the Righthaven suits charge one, or a handful, of infringements. Defendants might be less willing to settle a lawsuit stemming from their posting of a single news article, despite the Copyright Act’s whopping damages. “You’d have to go after a lot of people for a relatively small amount of money,” says Jonathan Band, a Washington, D.C. copyright lawyer. “That is a riskier proposition.”

Gibson claims Righthaven has already settled several lawsuits, the bulk of which are being chronicled by the Las Vegas Sun, for undisclosed sums.

One defendant who is ready to settle is Fred Bouzek, a Virginia man who runs bikernews.net, a user-generated site about hardcore biker news. He was sued last week on allegations the site ran a Las Vegas Review-Journal story about police going under cover with the Hell’s Angels.

Even if he had grounds to fight the case, he says it would be cheaper to settle. “The only choice I have is to try to raise money and offer a settlement,” he says.

Bill Irvine of Phoenix says he is fighting infringement allegations targeting AboveTopSecret.com, the site he controls under The Above Network. The site is accused of infringing a Review-Journal article on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The site is a user-generated discussion on “conspiracies, UFO’s, paranormal, secret societies, political scandals, new world order, terrorism, and dozens of related topics” and gets about 5 million hits monthly, Irvine says.

Righthaven, he says, should have sent him a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because the article was posted by a user, not the site itself.

“In this case, we feel this suit does not have merit,” he says. “We are confident we will have success challenging it.”

Gibson says he’s just getting started. Righthaven has other media clients that he won’t name until the lawsuits start rolling out, he says.

“Frankly, I think we’re having tremendous success at a number of levels,” Gibson says. “We file new complaints every day.”

Edited July 26, 2010 by niremetal

[Brokentree]

I know lots of journalists. Not one of them cares if their writing is pirated. They don't get paid per "subscriber hit." They are paid either on salary or per article, and the more people read their stuff, the more exposure they get. As long as the byline is copied along with the rest, the only ones who really lose out on a copy/paste are the corporate owners. And even they aren't losing much, because it's not like people would pay $10/month for their sites in the absence of the copy/paste versions.

I also know lots of lawyers who think like Gibson. Trust me, they don't care about protecting the rights of the little freelance journalist trying to feed his family. Not one bit.

So in your/his honor:

Journalists might not be paid per hit but the people that pay them sure are. The more hits they get the more advertisement dollars they can potentially land. If they aren't making money then in the long run alot of journalists aren't either. The company I work for makes cheese. Should I care whether people buy our cheese or someone elses? The company doesn't pay me for each unit they sell afterall.

[niremetal]

Journalists might not be paid per hit but the people that pay them sure are. The more hits they get the more advertisement dollars they can potentially land. If they aren't making money then in the long run alot of journalists aren't either. The company I work for makes cheese. Should I care whether people buy our cheese or someone elses? The company doesn't pay me for each unit they sell afterall.

I can barely even begin to explain the monumental gaps in logic there. Suffice it to say that in the information age, articles are not like cheese. For most of the articles that get posted, the choice is not between reading an article on Blog X and reading the article on NewspaperY.com. It's between reading it on Blog X and not reading it at all, because more and more consumers are not willing to pay for content. I agree that copying and pasting articles that are freely available on NewspaperY.com and are gratuitously posted in their entirety on Blog X might lose ad revenues. But if NewspaperY.com is a subscriber-only service on ESPN Insider? Not so much.

Edited July 26, 2010 by niremetal

[Brokentree]

I can barely even begin to explain the monumental gaps in logic there. Suffice it to say that in the information age, articles are not like cheese. For most of the articles that get posted, the choice is not between reading an article on Blog X and reading the article on NewspaperY.com. It's between reading it on Blog X and not reading it at all, because more and more consumers are not willing to pay for content. I agree that copying and pasting articles that are freely available on NewspaperY.com and are gratuitously posted in their entirety on Blog X might lose ad revenues. But if NewspaperY.com is a subscriber-only service on ESPN Insider? Not so much.

You can barely even begin to explain because you can't. The logic is there and you are just not willing to accept it. If people are not willing to pay for things then people should not get them. People seem to naturally think that things on the internet are free. It is a fundamental flaw in how people have come to think. Is it ok for a newspaper on the east coast to take an article from a newspaper on the west coast and print it based purely on the idea that its harder to get west coast newspaper on the east coast? Oh darn its harder to distribute over there so yeah you can just have it? No no.. don't be crazy. You don't need to pay us for it. Where are peoples ethics? Oooh people that read my blog will love this article, copy.. paste.. cha-ching!$ Thats quite the work ethic there.

Sure the guy might seem like some sneaky lawyer but he would not be able to do this if it wasn't based on someone doing something wrong. If people are hiring him to do what he does then those people do indeed feel that it is hurting them.

[spotatl]

I don't have any problem at all with the lawyer going after people that post entire articles. Particularly when people are posting the entire contents of articles that you ahve to pay to read. If a newspaper wants to charge to have people read their stuff, maybe it is a poor decision and they will just end up alienating their readership. But they should have the option of charging for it if they want to. Just because someone is too cheap to pay the $4 a year to have ESPN insider access doesn't mean that ESPN is screwing people by charging. If you don't think the articles are worth the money then thats your choice. If they ahve a product good enough to charge for then I think they should absolutely be able to get the benefits from that and people should only be excerpting and linking. Newspapers are struggling massively- I wouldn't take a newspaper even if they were free just because I don't want the clutter. SO I really don't begrudge pulbications from trying to make money however they can.

Edited July 26, 2010 by spotatl

[niremetal]

People seem to naturally think that things on the internet are free. It is a fundamental flaw in how people have come to think.

Where are peoples ethics? Oooh people that read my blog will love this article, copy.. paste.. cha-ching!$ Thats quite the work ethic there.

Welcome to the information age. You're basically saying that most people on the internet have the wrong mentality, and that the solution is litigation (which will only work against big name blogs anyway, not anonymous user blogs like HS) rather than, you know, recognizing and adapting to changes in consumer mentality (as most websites have done).

Alrighty then. Good luck with that.

Edited July 26, 2010 by niremetal

[spotatl]

niremetal- just because you wish people would give away everything for free doesn't mean that people should be prohibited from charging. It very well may be counterproductive for those publications to charge for their product but they should absolutely be allowed to if they think that is in their best interest. If you think they are wrong then just ignore the articles that you don't think are worth the money.

[niremetal]

niremetal- just because you wish people would give away everything for free doesn't mean that people should be prohibited from charging. It very well may be counterproductive for those publications to charge for their product but they should absolutely be allowed to if they think that is in their best interest. If you think they are wrong then just ignore the articles that you don't think are worth the money.

I'm not disagreeing with the ethics of it at all, spotatl. I pay for subscriptions to Consumer Reports and The Economist despite the fact that through a loophole in my former school's system, I can view all their stuff for free if I wanted to using my alumni account. I also use iTunes or Amazon to buy all my music rather than using Limewire or BitTorrent to get songs free.

But that's me. Most people I know simply don't have mentality. Companies are, of course, free to charge for access to their materials. But I think it's a business strategy that is ultimately doomed to fail. Suing people for sharing things they have and find cool/interesting will ultimately just lead to a backlash, as the recording industry has already discovered.

Edited July 26, 2010 by niremetal

[spotatl]

If people are breaking the law by posting information that another person is charging for then I do think there should be legal reprocussions. I agree that in many situations its counterproductive to charge but I also think that people should be allowed to if thats what they choose to do.

[NineOhTheRino]

I have a problem with today's generation lack of respect for others intellectual property, and have a problem with the greedy business SOBs always trying to make a buck off of crap that should be given away. Honestly, I was taught that Al Gore invented the net as a place to exchange ideas and information for free. Should business respect these values and forgo their attempts of e-colonization or should the rest of us adapt?

idk

[spotatl]

The internet is a place where you CAN exchange your own ideas for free. People should also be able to choose to charge for reading their opinions if there is enough demand. And if you choose to circumvent their attempts to make money then I think there should be legal consequences.

[NineOhTheRino]

The internet is a place where you CAN exchange your own ideas for free. People should also be able to choose to charge for reading their opinions if there is enough demand. And if you choose to circumvent their attempts to make money then I think there should be legal consequences.

agree...well said

[spotatl]

Put it this way. Someone requested the ESPN insider article that mentioned Jordan Crawford. To me the proper balance is to quote just pieces of it where if you want the whole thing then you should sign up for ESPN insider yourself. Instead someone went ahead and posted the whole article. There is no question that reduces the demand for ESPN's insider service and if a site like this chooses to leave those full articles in the posts then I can't see a good justification why there isn't legal exposure.

I know on realgm you are suppposed to quote just 3 paragraphs and then link to the article. I have no idea what the guidelines of this site are but the realgm policy seems pretty reasonable to me.

[coachx]

I hate to go against the flow but I more or less agree with this. The entire reposting of an article is just plain stealing. The article is posted on a site so that people go to that site and are annoyed by that sites advertisements. Its how they make money and its how they pay bills and its how they feed their children. Now if we're talking about links to articles with maybe a quote or two that is completely different. A link is free advertisment for their site. If funnels people to that site that would otherwise never see it. It creates hits and increases their revenue. Links=GOOD. Copy+Paste=BAD.

You are correct sir !

Those of us who grew up before the internet get this.