Could The Legality Of Google's Cache Kill Righthaven's(DU Suer) Copyright Claims?

[RamboLiberal]

One of the suits by Righthaven is against DU in case you missed.

As Righthaven continues to file lawsuits, it seems that various lawyers who are concerned about copyright, free speech and chilling effects online have been rushing to help defend some of those sued. I can't recall a situation (even with US Copyright Group) where lawyers have been so eager to take on a company filing copyright infringement claims. Of course, the really interesting part is how some of the lawyers are testing out a variety of defenses to the lawsuits, some which seem to have a much better chance of passing judicial muster than others.

For example, some are claiming that Righthaven has no standing to sue, since it waits until after it's found the infringement to "buy" the copyright to the article in question from Stephens Media/Las Vegas Review-Journal. Others have argued that the lack of any actual damages should get the lawsuits dismissed. Still others have challenged the jurisdiction.

One interesting argument, based on an earlier ruling on the legality of Google's cache, makes the reposting of these articles "fair use." Unfortunately, the fact pattern in that case does appear to be a bit different. It not only involved a guy suing over the Google cache, but that guy also first requested that Google scan his pages, then made the request to visit the cache himself. Still, in that case, Google argued that without a robots.txt blocking them from caching the article, the guy had given implicit permission:

"Even if Google could be viewed as having made or distributed these copies of Field's works, Field impliedly granted Google permission to do so. Field displayed his site on the Internet without including any label, including those that are industry standard, to instruct Google not to present 'cached' links to the pages containing his works," Google attorneys argued.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100819/01552110678.shtml

-----

New court filings show attorneys may argue that the Righthaven lawsuits are meritless since the Review-Journal website encouraged the online sharing of R-J stories -- providing an implied license to websites and bloggers displaying the material.

-----

They also wrote: "As with every article that Righthaven is suing on, the allegedly infringed work was available for free on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s website and is still available for free by conducting a Google search on the title of the article. There is no harm, no damages to Righthaven ..."

-----

"The Las Vegas Review-Journal, offered the allegedly infringed work to the world for free when it was originally published. It encouraged people to save links to the work or to send links to the work to others anywhere in the world at no cost and without restriction. The Las Vegas Review-Journal web site also enables third parties to 'right click' and copy the text of articles on the site. Accordingly, based on this implied license, the allegedly infringing copy was, in fact, authorized by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and therefore, is not an infringement," the Lewis and Roca attorneys wrote.

Lewis and Roca's attorneys cited as precedent an implied license ruling in 2006 by U.S. District Judge Robert Jones in Las Vegas, who threw out a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google by Las Vegas attorney Blake A. Field.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/aug/18/website-operators-use-new-defenses-fight-r-j-copyr/

[ret5hd]

1. BwAAAAHAAHAAHAA!