Electronic Frontier Foundation | The Times-Picayune
A March 9 ruling makes it harder for copyright holders to sue when their work is reproduced in online discussion forums. In a lawsuit concerning five sentences of a Las Vegas Review-Journal article posted on the forum Democratic Underground, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Hunt wrote in his final declaratory judgment that "the act of posting this five-sentence excerpt of a fifty sentence news article on a political discussion forum is a fair use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 107, and that the fair use doctrine provides a complete defense to the claim of copyright infringement from which this suit arose." (more...)

Associated Press | Meltwater
Six weeks after the AP and other investors launched a licensing organization to collect fees from aggregators, the AP has filed a lawsuit against Meltwater News, which bills itself as "more than a traditional media monitoring service." AP CEO Curley calls it a "parasitic distribution service" that is undercutting AP's business by providing its content to Meltwater clients without paying for it.

The AP says Meltwater is taking its customers — not the newspapers and broadcasters you normally think of as AP clients, and not the average guy scanning Google News at lunch, but those like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to the lawsuit:

The U.S. government is one of AP's largest customers, and AP's subscriber roster includes nearly 100 government agencies — federal, state, local and foreign — including the U.S. Senate, the U.S. State Department, the New York City Police Department, and various foreign embassies. These government subscribers often do not publish the stories themselves, but monitor the news wire to stay apprised of timely, accurate news reports as they develop. ...

AP has lost, and continues to lose, customers to Meltwater over the past several years. For example, the Department of Homeland Security terminated its contract with AP, choosing instead to receive AP content through Meltwater.

(more...)

ReadWriteWeb
Like other sites that rely on user-generated content , the visually-oriented social media site Pinterest avoids violating copyright law by responding to requests to take down material posted without permission of the copyright holder. ReadWriteWeb's Dave Copeland says Pinterest users are better about giving credit than Tumblr, but copyright is still a concern:

"That being said, it's still awful that I might discover a new painter on Pinterest and not be able to find them. To not know their name or have their website," said [artist Laura C. George]. "It's truly an awful situation...it seems impossible to enforce this type of rule on such a huge site with thousands of members and billions of pins. They would have to check the link to every 'original' pin and research to make sure it was the original. That's insane."

A few news outlets are using the service to highlight their work. The "Today" show is posting images of "Anchor Antics," The Wall Street Journal has posted historic front pages, and Time magazine is posting its covers. || Related: How to adapt online news in the age of sharing (Poynter) | Why it’s time for journalists to pay attention to Pinterest & what you can do there (Poynter) | Pinterest is gaining on Twitter in terms of referral traffic, but Facebook's still on top (GigaOM)

HowardOwens.com
Twice this summer, the Daily Mail pulled photos from The Batavian and republished them without permission or compensation. After some effort, Howard Owens finally was paid on Friday. He got nowhere with the Daily Mail until he saw Jim Romenesko's post in September describing how the website had rewritten a Washington Post story and then asked the Post reporter for help in getting a photo for it. Owens sent a Facebook message to Bradford Noble, the editor named in that post, who referred the matter to a photo editor in London. Owens says that he was paid $150, twice the Daily Mail's freelance rate, for each of the three photos. "The photo [of Suzanne Corona] has shown up other places without compensation, such as WTSP, MSN, CBS12,Hot97 and Barstool Sports," Owens writes. "I guess I need to send some letters to these publishers next." As for the London blogger who complained about the Daily Mail using her photos of a mannequin at The Gap (the post that spurred Owens' first complaint to Poynter.org), she blogged in late August that the newspaper had agreed to donate £2,000 to two charities for using her photos. She told me this morning that the charities got their money, too.

Las Vegas Sun
Righthaven, the company that has tried to make a business out of suing for copyright infringement, has been ordered to pay $119,488 in attorneys' fees and court costs after a judge ruled that it has no right to sue. Righthaven sued Thomas DiBiase, a former federal prosecutor who runs a website covering murder cases in which the victims' bodies haven't been located. Righthaven claimed that he infringed on copyright by posting a Las Vegas Review-Journal story. The judge ruled that Righthaven had no right to sue, however, for the same reason its other lawsuits have run aground: The company doesn't hold the copyright. DiBiase's attorneys argued that his use of the story was protected under fair use, but the judge didn't rule on that issue. Steve Green reports that Righthaven likely will appeal the ruling. || Earlier: Judge dismisses copyright case, says Righthaven can’t sue on behalf of Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Wrap
Sharon Waxman writes that a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the parent company of Deadline against the company that owns The Hollywood Reporter tries to fight the way news is broken on the Web. What Deadline founder Nikki Finke says is stealing, Waxman writes, is simply what news outlets have been doing for years -- confirming news that their competitors break. "Here’s the problem: any website can follow news that is broken on a given site, change a few words, and publish it. THR aside, that it is the way of the web. Countless sites pick up news that has been gathered by sites that do original reporting -- including TheWrap and Deadline -- and cut and paste." The Wrap also reports that the claim of stealing entire stories appears to be unsubstantiated. But it notes that The Hollywood Reporter has removed a home page carousel that the lawsuit says is identical, code-wise, to one of Deadline's sister sites, down to a misspelling ("carouasel") and the initials of Deadline's parent company. The Hollywood Reporter says the carousel was coded by a vendor and that it takes that allegation seriously, unlike the other parts of the lawsuit.

Wired.com
Righthaven hasn't sued anyone for copyright infringement in two months, a dramatic slowdown after filing about 275 lawsuits since early last year on behalf of newspapers, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Denver Post. Righthaven has settled more than 100 cases for a few thousand dollars each, but since then, judges have ruled that the company can't sue because it doesn't hold the copyrights. Intellectual property scholar Eric Goldman tells David Kravets that the legal complications cast doubt on Righthaven's business model. “In theory, it seems like it was ingenuous. Newspapers are one of the largest owners of copyrights out there and they just sit on their assets ... But you’d need such a high volume of cases with enough dollar value to justify the enforcement effort. They were going after the small fries — the least likely to pay.” || More trouble: Dan Gillmor tweets that he hopes the first thing John Paton "does with MediaNews is to terminate all relations with copyright troll RightHaven," to which Paton responds, "Media News has already terminated their relationship." || Related: U.K.’s Daily Mail uses blogger’s photos after she denies them permission, lifts photos from The Batavian

Wonderland
Alice Taylor describes how her photo of an unhealthily skinny mannequin at a London Gap store ended up on MailOnline.com, the Daily Mail's website, without her permission. After she tweeted the photo, her husband Cory Doctorow posted it to BoingBoing. When The Washington Post asked for permission to use the photo, she said yes. But when the Daily Mail asked, she said it would cost £250, in the form of a charitable donation. "And then, instead, the Daily Mail then used both my photos - despite being denied permission - lifting them directly from the WashPo, along with the quotes I gave that newspaper, too," Taylor writes. Now she wants £1,000 for each photo. (I have emailed someone at the Daily Mail for a response.) || Related: BBC News editor says site may use social media photos without permission ‘in exceptional situations’