This time it’s particularly egregious.
Clayton Cramer (Who was recently cited in McDonald vs Chicago decision) has been sued by the Las Vegas Review-Journal for copyright infringement.
Today, The Armed Citizen received informal notice in the form of a media inquiry about a lawsuit against this website and its owners, David Burnett and Clayton Cramer. The lawsuit, reportedly filed in US District Court on July 20th, alleges that The Armed Citizen and its owners “willfully copied” original source content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
According to news reports, Righthaven LLC has reportedly filed lawsuits against 75 other political websites and/or blogs without prior contact or attempt at resolution. The sites include FreeRepublic.com, the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
I guess they missed the memo about how stupid it is to sue bloggers.
There are also some shenanigans going on because The Armed Citizen wasn’t contacted beforehand and asked to remove any infringing material.
The Armed Citizen has been excerpting articles from newspaper, TV station, and radio station websites for a number of years. If any copyright holders decided that The Armed Citizen had exceeded fair use, they only needed to send us an email. Instead, in a bid to target and intimidate small websites, they have chosen to pursue legal action.
I’m pretty sure David Burnett and Clayton Cramer know what fair use is. If failing newspapers think they can reverse the tide by suing bloggers then they’ll only fail that much quicker.
Contact info for the reprehensible newspaper in question is on Clayton’s post.
And probably the only traffic the newspaper got to it’s website was directed to it by the blogs.
Bring it on dead tree folks.
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The best part about this? The current editor of this cat-box-liner was actually for this kind of thing before it turns out that he is actually against it. Guess it stopped being convenient…
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Anyone else read the lawsuit? One thing that Righthaven LLC (the copyright owner) is asking for is for the court to order GoDaddy (the registrar) to turn over control of the domain (thearmedcitizen.com) to them.