How Righthaven is performing a public good | Hacker News Reader

How Righthaven is performing a public good

blog.ericgoldman.org

35 pointsgrellas10 comments

In the tests the court used to decide fair use:

the defendants' use was transformative because Righthaven is a litigation-driven business, the republication was to educate the defendants' audience, and it had no substitutive effects

Ouch! It would be hard to fail that test unless you went out suing people for violating copyright trolls' copyrights.

It's also worth noting that the defendant published all 33 paragraphs of an article and that was alright because it was not easily distilled or edited.

That's called the four-factor test. It's the standard used when deciding whether or not something is fair use. See: http://depts.washington.edu/uwcopy/Copyright_Law/Fair_Use/Fo...

You're right about them having to utterly fail to lose an argument like that, but these folks are not exactly doing high quality legal work. Check out this story from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/righthaven-defies-cour...

They cited a non-existent subsection of an inapplicable law, claimed to own something a recently unsealed agreement proves that they do not, in fact, own any exclusive rights to, and advanced the same tired arguments that they've already had shot down in court. All in all, it makes their complaint look like the equivalent of copypasta.

> It's also worth noting that the defendant published all 33 paragraphs of an article and that was alright because it was not easily distilled or edited.

I find it hard to believe that a 33 paragraph article contained so little original expression that in order to copy the facts (which are not subject to copyright) one would need to copy the entire article verbatim.

From what I can see, they don't have skilled lawyers and have been writing form-letter complaints. They also managed to piss off the judge who is hearing all their complaints.

So, yeah. While in an ordinary case, the judge might be willing to just assume things like commercial use or harm caused by someone copying the story, they're going to have to establish that all by themselves. And it would appear that they've failed to do anything of the sort so far.

I can't imagine that they'll make any money on this case.

I don't think "just the facts" is the test here, though that would be a different possible defense in a copyright infringement case.

Rightshaven reminds me of the Demotivator: "It might be that your purpose in life is solely to serve as a warning to others."

This piece misses a major part of the story-- the courts may be on the verge of declaring that copyright was never actually transferred to Righthaven, and that they have no right to sue in any of these cases.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/righthaven-r...

Good coverage of this issue on this week's On the Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2011/04/22/02

Honestly, I would say that it's more the court hearing these that's performing the public good by crushing Righthaven's cases.

But I'm still glad that they're expanding fair use, even if they were hoping to do the opposite.

I definitely look forward to the day Righthaven shuts their doors, no matter how much blog-friendly case law is being created by their ridiculous lawsuits.

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