aray
02-13-2011, 08:36 PM
I posted on this subject before, but there are a bunch of lawyers out there suing web forums for including copyrighted material in postings. In the past they have mostly gone after web site owners, demanding $150,000 and forfeiture of the domain names. Now they are going after individual posters as well:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jan/12/righthaven-extends-copyright-lawsuit-campaign-indi/
Righthaven in particular are a bunch of sharks who seem to have made a business model of using Google to find stuff, filing expensive out-of-state lawsuits, and then settling for shake-down money. Cheap, easy, and excellent return on investment on their part. But Righthaven by no means are the only ones out there doing this - they are just the market innovators.
I just spent some time going over my old posts, making sure I did not include substantial content from other websites, newspapers, or other news organizations like text versions of cable TV sites on the internet, and instead just having a summary and link to the original source. I had a small handful of postings that needed to be cleaned up. Unless I accidentally missed something, I'm now "clean" and have done due diligence to remove any material not protected by "fair use" under the DCMA. That was certainly my intent.
I recommend everyone be careful about doing copy & pastes from other sources, and also see what you can do to purge material from previous postings. This is in the best interests of us all, as well as helping to protect kahrtalk.com from frivolous, but expensive, lawsuits.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jan/12/righthaven-extends-copyright-lawsuit-campaign-indi/
Righthaven in particular are a bunch of sharks who seem to have made a business model of using Google to find stuff, filing expensive out-of-state lawsuits, and then settling for shake-down money. Cheap, easy, and excellent return on investment on their part. But Righthaven by no means are the only ones out there doing this - they are just the market innovators.
I just spent some time going over my old posts, making sure I did not include substantial content from other websites, newspapers, or other news organizations like text versions of cable TV sites on the internet, and instead just having a summary and link to the original source. I had a small handful of postings that needed to be cleaned up. Unless I accidentally missed something, I'm now "clean" and have done due diligence to remove any material not protected by "fair use" under the DCMA. That was certainly my intent.
I recommend everyone be careful about doing copy & pastes from other sources, and also see what you can do to purge material from previous postings. This is in the best interests of us all, as well as helping to protect kahrtalk.com from frivolous, but expensive, lawsuits.