Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits

A very creepy business plan.

From the Wired article said:

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad.

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

“We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.”

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_http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/copyright-trolling-for-dollars/#ixzz0vIrAUSlx

And at the end of the story there is an interesting bit about Gibson going after Bill Irvine and the ATS Network:

From the Wired article said:

Bill Irvine of Phoenix says he is fighting infringement allegations targeting AboveTopSecret.com, the site he controls under The Above Network. The site is accused of infringing a Review-Journal article on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The site is a user-generated discussion on “conspiracies, UFO’s, paranormal, secret societies, political scandals, new world order, terrorism, and dozens of related topics” and gets about 5 million hits monthly, Irvine says.

Righthaven, he says, should have sent him a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because the article was posted by a user, not the site itself.

“In this case, we feel this suit does not have merit,” he says. “We are confident we will have success challenging it.”

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OF NOTE: The Wired article has a sizable linked image to the The Above Network outfit to the right of the article page. Now, what's up with that? Wonder if it's just a game to make ATS look persecuted and gain some traffic at the same time. Or maybe just a dumb ATS user who posted an article in its entirety and got caught in Gibson's web.

NormaRegula said:

OF NOTE: The Wired article has a sizable linked image to the The Above Network outfit to the right of the article page. Now, what's up with that? Wonder if it's just a game to make ATS look persecuted and gain some traffic at the same time.

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NormaRegula,

These were my initial thoughts exactly. It could be a planted article just to draw more people to ATS. All publicity, in this sense, being good publicity.

RyanX said:

It could be a planted article just to draw more people to ATS. All publicity, in this sense, being good publicity.

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The article's topic is legit...however, the planted ad, er, link looks might suspicious. Yeah, the publicity- good or bad - will generate some traffic for that Cointelpro operation - that's for sure.

Notice that, despite the fact that we sent out several press releases, who did and did not carry the story about our own First Amendment lawsuit. That says it all.

Laura said:

Notice that, despite the fact that we sent out several press releases, who did and did not carry the story about our own First Amendment lawsuit. That says it all.

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Yeah. Wired Magazine should have latched on to that story BIG TIME. Yet there was total silence.

On that note, I was recently given a link that showed how Wired Magazine quickly turned the BP Oil Spill into a farce entitled Photoshop of Horrors by asking readers to submit their photoshopped images to show BP how it is done.

Sure, it might be somewhat amusing to those who can't see the big - horrific - picture. Talk about distractions. Wouldn't be surprised if BP - and its media friends - were being clever in that regard.

Also came across a photography forum discussion going on in the Photophobia - Law vs. Reality thread about BP's badly-altered photos and why a billion dollar+ corporation did not have the brains to hire someone with more expertise.

One of the forum members had this to say: "Here's the really interesting thing, if you think about it: BP did this horrible Photoshop job on these photos… And now lots of people are talking about their horrible Photoshop skills instead of their responsibilities in the Gulf of Mexico. Just a little conspiracy theory stuff to make you think."

_http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/forum/show-feedback/photophobia-the-law-vs-reality/