Free for a Fee

In 2011, the US government grabbed two domains, one .com and one .org, belonging to Spanish sports-TV “linking site” Rojadirecta, claiming that the site was a flagrant enabler of copyright infringement. The government then sought forfeiture of the domains, at which point Rojadirecta’s Spanish parent company fought back. A year and a half after the seizure, the government has capitulated—today it dismissed the case against Rojadirecta and will have to return the domains.

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The Associated Press is suing a paid news subscription company, alleging Tuesday that repackaging the wire service’s news content is a “parasitic business model.”

The suit (PDF) blasts the Meltwater Group of San Francisco, saying the 10-year-old company’s subscription service charges a fee for “content created at the expense and through the labor of others.”

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News aggregation impresario Matt Drudge is being sued for copyright infringement for reproducing a copyrighted photo along with a link to a story about airport security on the Las Vegas Review-Journal website.

The plaintiff in the case is Righthaven, a company that’s earned a reputation this year as a world-class copyright troll.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/copyright-troll-righthaven-sues-for-control-of-drudge-report-domain.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssf and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

http://news.justia.com/cases/featured/california/cacdce/2:2004cv09484/167815/#20090809

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By Eric Goldman

Google, Inc v. John Beck Amazing Profits, LLC, C09 03459 (N.D. Cal. complaint filed July 27, 2009). [Warning: 1.4MB file] The Justia page.

A couple of interesting developments in John Beck Amazing Profits v. Google, the putative nationwide trademark owner class action lawsuit against Google over AdWords.

First, as of last week, the plaintiff had not served the complaint on Google even though it’s been on file for over 2 months. I’m not sure what’s the hold-up, but in my limited experience, delays in serving an already-filed complaint are often a leading indicator of a troubled lawsuit.

Second, last week Google sued the individual named plaintiff in that case, John Beck Amazing Profits, for both a declaratory judgment that AdWords doesn’t infringe plus a breach of contract claim that the lawsuit filing breached the AdWords contract provision requiring any AdWords-related lawsuit to be brought in California. Going on the offensive against a plaintiff is characteristic of Google’s litigation strategy; Google often tries to turn the tables on its litigation opponents. In this case, a major goal for Google surely is to get the case out of the Eastern District of Texas, which has been a dangerous venue for patent defendants.

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The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to “apply protective format to news.” The AP’s news registry will “tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,” and it will provide a “platform for protect, point, and pay.” That’s a lot of “p”-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news—”enforcement,” in AP-speak.

But how could that possibly work?

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By Eric Goldman

Rosetta Stone Ltd. v. Google, Inc., 1:09-cv-00736-GBL-JFA (E.D. Va. complaint filed July 10, 2009)

[Note: some of you may wonder how my litigation count reached #9 when my last blog post in this series was at #7. I subsequently realized that I had forgotten to include Ezzo v. Google, a doomed-to-failed pro se lawsuit filed pre-Rescuecom. Indeed, I remain unclear precisely how many lawsuits are pending; the number could be greater than 9].

Kudos to Rosetta Stone for its fine PR work. It was able to get a number of major media outlets to cover its lawsuit against Google alleging trademark infringement and related claims for Google’s AdWords practices, even though by my count this is merely the 9th pending lawsuit and these lawsuits are becoming a near-daily routine.

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The desertion of advertising dollars from the ailing print media industry has left publishers searching for more of the one thing that the Internet seems intent on denying them: paying customers. Print publications in the US and Europe are scrambling to find ways to charge somebody—readers, link aggregators, blogs, competitors—for deriving any sort of benefit from the reporting they’re doing.

A group of European publishers has recently released a declaration of principles, the “Hamburg Declaration,” that amounts to a long-winded rant against the Internet for stealing their news. They want the government to step in and fix the situation by force of law.

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By Eric Goldman

I recently spoke on the state of keyword advertising law, which prompted me to rewrite my PowerPoint slides from scratch in light of the many recent developments. So, now available for your enjoyment:

* my talk slides
* an 80 minute free audio recording of my June presentation of this slide deck (plus Q&A) to the IAB Legal Affairs Committee. You can listen in QuickTime or download from iTunesU (for free; go to item 26)
* the CLE written material, a compilation of recent blog posts on the many lawsuits against Google and Google’s two trademark policy changes. I would now add the Ezzo, Ascentive and Jurin cases to the written materials.

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Judge Posner started the discussion with this blog post which concludes:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

TechDirt criticized the conclusion, as did Jeff Jarvis.

Then Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, wrote “Tighter Copyright Law Could Save Newspapers,” proposing a 24 hour window of ‘hot news exclusivity,’ which Jarvis critiqued and Schultz responded.

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