As House Republicans move malpractice lawsuit reforms through Congress, they might want to add another abuse of the legal system to their agenda.
Throughout the Reid-Angle Senate race in Nevada, we were scared to death to quote or link to anything at the Las Vegas Review Journal (dare I even post something with their name in it?) because they have farmed out copyright infringement to a serial lawsuit abuser.
Righthaven, LLC, about whom you can read more here, has agreements with several newspapers, including also the Denver Post, to enforce copyrights by filing ridiculous lawsuits against anyone who excerpts their work. The latest is their $150,000 lawsuit against an autistic blogger who used a photograph from their website. The company's modus operandi is to file lawsuits without notice and then offer settlements, usually of less than $10,000, which most small-time bloggers would sooner pay than engage in a lengthy court fight. It's great work if you can get it, and the site linked above estimates that it's brought in about $364,000 in just a year, but it still has plenty of cases pending.
As the linked article explains, part of the problem is that current copyright law is ambiguous about what constitutes "fair use." Congress could put an end to this gaming of the legal system by rectifying this. It's something that House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Tex., should seriously consider. Not that I'm condoning violence or being uncivil, but I hope those Righthaven LLC chaps die in a fire and then burn in hell in a polite and civil way, of course.
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The better approach would be to eliminate statutory damages for commercially available goods. It makes sense when you have what amounts to a trade secret (unpublished copyright). But statutory damages make absolutely no sense for commodities. If I can buy a song online for $0.99, how do you justify statutory damages of $150,000?
The reasoning for having statutory damages in the first place was that for some kinds of copyrighted works it is very difficult to determine what damages should be. Take, for example, the unlicensed publishing of someones diary, or a work of art which an artist does not want released to the public.
R-haven has done us one service. They have demonstrated just how badly the current statutory damages scheme really works. End it for published, commodity works. Go with treble damages and be done with it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
As House Republicans move malpractice lawsuit reforms through Congress, they might want to add another abuse of the legal system to their agenda.
