3 Count: D’oh!

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1: Copyright Troll Righthaven’s Epic Blunder: A Lawsuit Targeting Ars

First off today, Righthaven filed suit against freelance writer Eriq Gardner over a column he wrote for the site Ars Technica. The article in question was about a previous Righthaven lawsuit, that one against The Drudge Report, in which Ars ran a photo taken from Righthaven’s filings in the case, which happened to depict a grainy version of the Denver Post photo the original lawsuit was over. Righthaven, which represents both the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post, announced they had dropped the suit against Gardner with prejudice after realizing their error, but the blunder called into further question Righthaven’s litigation tactics, which involve suing sites and their owners over using content from various newspapers without first filing any form of warning.

2: In Bow to Authors, Baidu Scrubs Document Sharing Site

Next up today, bowing to pressure from local authors, Chinese search engine Baidu has scrubbed nearly 3 million documents from its document sharing service, Wenku, and has said that it will shut down the service if problems continue. Baidu also said that it is seeking a new round of negotiations with authors and other copyright holders regarding the document service and is hoping to reach a mutually-beneficially agreement. Though Baidu has said it can’t be certainly 100% of the infringing material is gone, it does hope that the mass deletion shows their good faith and will help bring authors to the negotiating table.

3: EMI Wins $950,000 in Copyright Infringement Lawsuit over Beatles Songs

Finally today, the BlueBeat.com case has been settled and EMI can expect to get nearly $1 million from Media Rights Technologies, the former owners of the site. BlueBeat was selling Beatles tracks for 25 cents without a license from EMI, who hold the rights to the songs, and, when pressed in court, claimed that they were not selling the original tracks but instead were offering ones created by ”psycho-acoustic simulation”. The judge, however, disagreed with that and found the company liable for infringement, prompting this settlement.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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