As newspapers and magazines continue to navigate the world of online publishing, companies specializing in lawsuits and reporters themselves have taken advantage of strict federal copyright laws regarding articles and photographs in order to make the elusive buck. This includes slapping bloggers with court summons, which can lead to payments of up to $150,000, often without warning. While publications should have protection over editorial content they produce, there is a fine line between monitoring that content and waging unnecessary war with smalltime writers.
In an article in The New York Times published on Monday, blogger Brian Hill expressed his shock at receiving a court summons from a “technology company” called Righthaven that represents The Denver Post and The Last Vegas Review-Journal. Hill had posted a picture of an airport security guard patting down an airline passenger, a picture that had originally been published in The Denver Post. He even took down the photo upon getting word from a reporter that he was being sued. Regardless, Hill is one of more than 200 people being sued in the Colorado-Nevada area for copyright infringement.
Companies such as Righthaven, the growth of which could signify new business opportunities as the demand for copyright lawsuits has increased with the advent of bloggers and online journalism, are the new ambulance chasers. Just as a lawyer represents and persuades victims of medical accidents to sue hospitals for all they’re worth, Righthaven looks for illicit material and sues bloggers for copyright infringement on the behalf of newspaper clients, even if these writers are garnering little to no traffic from their “stolen material.” Ambulance chasers are renowned for being low-grade lawyers for a reason.
Though it is important to give credit to photographers and reporters for the work they create, it’s unfair for newspapers and copyright enforcement companies to say that these bloggers are having any sort of real financial impact on newspapers or that obtaining copyrights after bloggers publish material with the intent to sue isn’t unfair. Many people are still unsure as to how they should navigate the Internet in terms of secondary sources and taking advantage of them shows the many easily penetrable loopholes of the law. But because ambulance chasers and their spawn will always exist, the only thing writers and bloggers can do to combat them is tread carefully.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
