Righthaven Setback; Judge Rules in Favor of Implied License

Our glorious friends at Righthaven, LLC have received their first legal smack down, and boy it feels good!  The Las Vegas Sun is reporting as of yesterday that new federal Judge Gloria Navarro, has given the go ahead to an implied consent license defense for Jan Klerks the owner of http://www.skyscrapercity.com and receipient of a Righthaven suit.


From the Sun's story, detailing the Judges ruling:

Navarro in her ruling wrote: "The defendant has reasonably asserted that the plaintiff's conduct may have constituted an implied license and that the defendant may have properly inferred that the (copyright) owner consented to the use, especially in light of the established and accepted custom of users freely and openly sharing certain information posted on the Internet."

Nice, stick the screws to these turds of the intarwebs!  Further, Judge Navarro opines:

"The Las Vegas Review-Journal offered the allegedly infringed work (story) to the world for free when it was originally published. It encouraged people to save links to the work or to send links to the work to others anywhere in the world at no cost and without restriction. The Las Vegas Review-Journal website also enables third parties to 'right click' and copy the text of articles on the site. Accordingly, based on this implied license, the allegedly infringing copy was, in fact, authorized by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and therefore, is not an infringement."

See, when people share original work for informational purposes only, and not to make a buck, it falls under fair use.  Perhaps this grubby lawyer should revisit the morality clause of his bar license!