How Many Words is Fair Use? Maybe More Than You and AP Thought

My takeaway from this piece is that the Righthaven model of so-called "copyright trolling" depends on intimidation leading to pre-litigation settlements and will break down or stall if those who are targets of the intimidation just realize that they do have grounds to fight.

The problem remains, though, that for most people paying a few thousand as a nuisance payout is simpler and cheaper than going to the expense of a legal fight that will cost that much just for taking the first step or two.

The Righthaven model is disturbing to me not so much for its trolling aspects (and it does have those, since Righthaven will, in effect, scout out the terrain, find the offending pieces, and then approach the papers to get assignments on those items) as for its "collection agency" overtones: it is a business model built fundamentally on harassment of small players who more often than not have inadvertently stepped into it without even realizing what they were doing. This is not a defense legally (see this piece for a lawyer-type analysis of why those sued are indeed often in the wrong under current copyright law: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/zelnick-copyright-tr...), but it raises public policy concerns about whether copyright law should be so structured as to allow this. The law may say it's right but, as with collection-agency forms of abuse, it feels fundamentally unfair.

Seems unlikely that this case is going to set a precedent that redefines fair use in a jurisdiction that will be useful to you. Best not to copy whole articles in that case.

(That said, it is idiotic that you can sue someone for a copy of an article that a/ they did not post and b/ you never notified them of before suing them. THAT is broken. It should be illegal in general to utilize the courts for remedy before an equitable agreement is attempted outside the courts.)