Could Full Article-Copying Be Ruled as Fair Use?

Righthaven Litigation Continues to Spark Questions

By WebProNews Staff · February 16, 2011 · 1 Comment

We’ve written about Righthaven a couple times. This is a company with a business model based on suing publishers and bloggers on behalf of newspaper clients like the Las Vegas Review-Journal, bringing lots of fair use questions into the forefront.

For more context and background on this, read our articles "Fair Use Controversy: The Gift That Keeps On Giving" and "Testing the Fair Use Balance".

PaidContent legal, regulatory, and privacy reporter Joe Mullin revisits the topic, suggesting that depending on how the litigation process goes, we may soon see 100% copying become "legally justified" in many cases.

He says this could happen if one of two things happens: a judge could rule that newspapers gave "implied license" to copy their content (through things like share buttons) or a judge could rule that even full copies of newspaper articles are often "fair use."

Read the whole article.

More coverage of fair use at WebProNews.

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There is 1 Comment. Add Yours.

matt smith
March 22, 2011 at 3:51 pm
Reply

The issue is the license agreement. If the licensee agreement states “all oral and implied licenses are void without a mutually signed agreement”, then you are a copyright infringemer and have no license defense under the CAFC 2008 ruling – breach of license for the $0 copyright.

So in this case, it sounds like the fair use defense worked, because of the lack of a license agreement that limited the fair use. Look at Oracle v Google. Tis case, it looks like a breach of license, and google cannot argue fair use, and by default is a copyright infringer (IMHO).