Group defends online free speech

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS

A San Francisco group that defends online free speech is taking on a Las Vegas company it says is shaking down news-sharing Internet users through more than 140 copyright infringement lawsuits filed this year.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s counterclaim represents the first significant challenge to Righthaven LLC’s unprecedented campaign to police the sharing of news content on blogs, political sites and personal Web pages.

At stake is what constitutes fair use — when and how it is appropriate to share content in an age where newsmakers increasingly encourage readers to share stories on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social networking sites.

The EFF argues that the lawsuits limit free speech and bully defendants into costly settlements by threatening $150,000 in damages and the transfer of domain names. The foundation represents Democratic Underground LLC, which Righthaven sued in August for posting parts of a Las Vegas Review-Journal article on a message board.

Many of the cases involve stories originally published by the Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest newspaper and the flagship of Stephens Media LLC.

“This case is a particularly abusive instance of a broad and aggressive strategy by Stephens Media, working in conjunction with its ‘little friend’ Righthaven as its front and sham representative, to seek windfall recoveries of statutory damages and to exact nuisance settlements by challenging a fair use of an excerpt of an article that Stephens Media makes freely available on the Internet,” says the counterclaim filed in Las Vegas federal court last week.

Righthaven’s chief executive officer, Steve Gibson, called EFF’s claims “inflammatory.”

“That’s just ridiculous, and the reason it is ridiculous is that I don’t think there has been any defendant that we’ve called to shake them down for a settlement,” he said.

Dozens of the lawsuits have been settled privately, and Righthaven and Stephens Media declined to disclose the terms.

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