PROTECTION RACKET
When the Denver Post issued a copyright infringement warning against unauthorized use of their content last month, news-watchers wondered: What’s up with that. The other shoe dropped this week, when South Carolina blogger Dana Eiser was sued for reprinting in its entirety a Post column by Mike Rosen entitled “A letter to the tea partiers” on her LowCountry912 blog. Interestingly enough, Eiser was sued neither by the Post nor its parent company MediaNews, but by Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC, a “newspaper copyright enforcement company,” which obtained the copyright through an agreement with MediaNews. Since March, Righthaven has filed 179 similar lawsuits from its home base in Nevada.
