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How Many Words is Fair Use? Maybe More Than You and AP Thought: Let's Look at a Righthaven Case

By Pamela Jones et al.

There is an interesting ruling [PDF] in a Righthaven copyright infringement case, one of its tidal wave of copyright infringement cases against bloggers in Nevada, Righthaven v. Klerks et al. Techrights highlights that the ruling indicates that the judge is willing to listen to the defendants' argument that there was an implied license. It's also a case asserting fair use. Anyone blogging would do well to read it, so I have it as text for you.

A reader had copied and pasted an entire article from a Righthaven client, The Las Vegas Review Journal, to a comment on the blog. The blogger was located in Illinois, not Nevada, which meant that to contest, he'd have to hire a Nevada lawyer to represent him in this case. Righthaven sent the notice of the litigation to the wrong address initially, and so the defendant didn't know it was happening until there was already a clerk's default against him. What should he do? Nothing? Call Righthaven and work out payments? Or hire a lawyer and try to get the default set aside? What would you do?

I've collected all the important documents in the case so far, so you can see exactly what this defendant did. So far, he did a number of things right.

Full post as published by Groklaw on September 22, 2010 (boomark / email).