There’s a new business that’s buying up the rights to newspaper articles and then threatening to sue website owners and bloggers who have reposted the articles without permission.
What makes this effective? The threat of an Internet attorney suing you on behalf of the business for copyright infringement.
If the copyright is registered properly, the owner can get up to 150,000 bucks in damages plus attorney fees etc. per violation. That’s a lot of dough for reprinting someone’s article. Think of it as copyright trolling for dollars.
Can you afford it? If your Internet attorney advised you to settle, could you afford several grand to do it in order to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit?
Remember that what you see on the Internet is 90%+ of the time protected by one or more copyright laws. When in doubt, don’t repost content without written permission from the owner.
To your online success!
-Mike the Internet attorney
P.S. Website Legal Forms Generator software creates a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice for your website.