The Artful Jurist

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” doesn’t necessarily apply to the articles that appear in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  The newspaper has teamed up with a new company called Righthaven whose purpose is to troll the Internet for websites that have illegally republished Review-Journal articles online and to instigate lawsuits against the infringers.

Most of the world thinks of “publishing” as something that involves the printing and selling of words or pictures on bound paper products.  But, from a legal standpoint, content is published anytime it is put into some format and made available to others.  That means putting something on a website -- whether it’s words, pictures, or sounds -- falls into the domain of publishing.  If you’re not the copyright owner of that material, republishing copyright protected matter runs afoul of the law.

Apparently, the Las Vegas Review-Journal was just ticked off enough about the republishing of its articles to send Righthaven out with a mandate to hunt and sue.  According to news reports (which I’m not going to republish here), Righthaven buys up the copyrights from the newspaper and then sues the people who’ve done the unauthorized web publishing.  The suits seek $75,000 in damages among other penalties.

This has raised some legal issues, such as Righthaven’s standing to sue for an infringement that occurred at a time prior to Righthaven actually having owned the copyright.