A few weeks ago, in a post on fair use in the blogosphere, I wrote:
“In my view, social norms in the blogosphere indeed represent a departure from the fair use doctrine, although I am not aware of actual court cases where a blogger has been accused of breaching copyright law. If someone knows of such a case, I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments.”
It turns out that there are such cases. Last weekend, The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle wrote about “copyright trolling”:
“Righthaven, a company which as of this writing has filed nearly 250 lawsuits against blogs and forum operators where content originated by Righthaven partners has been posted. (…)
Unfortunately, Righthaven eventually picked on someone with access to their own lawyers–Democratic Underground, which has apparently enlisted the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is countersuing for coverage of its legal fees, as well as seeking rulings that DU/EFF argue will undermine Righthaven’s whole business model. Righthaven is now accusing its opponents of … no, really, I’m not making this up … ‘litigation overkill.'”