

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Something Fishy With Righthaven and The AP

A law website, law.com, is reporting that the Associated Press (AP) will not be dealing with Righthaven over protecting their copyrights. Dean Singleton who is the editor of the Denver Post and current chair of the AP has up till now been a strong supporter of Righthaven and it was thought that Righthaven would pick up the AP but what a couple of court losses and some very embarrassing high profile lawsuits such as Brian Hill of North Carolina make. Another bad move by Righthaven was to sue an AP affiliate, The Toronto Star, for posting the now infamous TSA image. Problem is it seems there were a number of AP affiliated papers that posted this image and credited the Photo to the AP.

According to Steve Green of the Las Vegas Sun other newspapers also recieved the photo and attributed to AP.
"We found the photo Wednesday on news sites including foxcharlotte.com, inforum.com, annarbor.com, deseretnews.com, heraldnet.com, washingtontimes.com and msnbc.msn.com, among others."
The question now being raised is how and why was the TSA image distributed by the AP and why the papers that printed it credited the AP and not the Denver Post? Why would Righthaven now sue a paper that printed this photo distributed by the AP if the Denver Post gave them permission? Or did they? So far no one has been able to explain this. This is a very serious matter because the distribution contributed to this image going viral. The Denver Post has some explaining to do on how the AP got this photo and if the AP had permission to distribute the Photo then why is an AP affiliate being sued and since the wide distribution of this photo encouraged it to go viral why did they sell the copyright to Righthaven to sue after it went viral?

These are very serous questions and should be raised by the lawyers involved defending Righthaven cases. This could even be the basis for a criminal investigation. Something is very fishy.

See: Related Las Vegas Sun article


  1. The APs choice not to go with Rigthhaven appears to get in the way of Righthaven's 'ultimate goal' of being the gateway to licensing content.


  2. All of this is very strange. These lawsuits are for $150,000 ea, trying to get the domain names (which sounds like trying to do away with freedom of speech) and include a lot of different people in the USA and other countries, now to find out some of these photos have a copyright by AP symbol, many don't even have a copyright at all. The more one thinks about this entire situation, the more strange it becomes and seems to involve a lot of different people and involves the court too.

  3. There is that; and also that Gibson is an idiot that truly lives in La La Land. His group can't even effectively serve the persons it sues. The man hardly "thought up" mass copyright infringement lawsuits. And his "technology" company (searching Google) can be operated by a SIX YEAR OLD. Not genius material to be sure...

  4. But perfectly suited to be a pawn in a broader scheme. Why should he care? He gets paid for being a pawn...probably handsomely...


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