Yikes! Armed Citizen Sued!

Self Defense Blog “The Armed Citizen” is being sued for copywrite infringement

Today, The Armed Citizen received informal notice in the form of a media inquiry about a lawsuit against this website and its owners, David Burnett and Clayton Cramer. The lawsuit, reportedly filed in US District Court on July 20th, alleges that The Armed Citizen and its owners “willfully copied” original source content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

According to news reports, Righthaven LLC has reportedly filed lawsuits against 75 other political websites and/or blogs without prior contact or attempt at resolution. The sites include FreeRepublic.com, the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws….We have removed all postings except this one until such time as we can carefully review each one for compliance with Fair Use–and it is entirely possible that they will never come back. Make you sure thank the Las Vegas Review-Journal for destroying a valuable gun rights resource because they can’t figure out how to run a newspaper, and have to make their money with dozens of lawsuits filed against multiple organizations for unintentional violations of Fair Use.

Scary stuff right there. The Armed citizen is both an amazing source for defensive firearms use, as well as citation to the local news sources that report them. Hopefully this will be resolved quickly and the blogmasters will continue their hard work again to keep us all informed of the real and human story of defensive firearms uses, and hopefully this will set precedence against papers maliciously abusing copywrite laws.

Also because the internet is forever, and you can’t stop the signal, check out the livejournal syndication page For their full archive with appropriate attributions still intact.

I see this as nothing more than a bunch of petulant fools attempting to monopolize their voice in the world, and I hope they will be appropriately punished. Sadly the real victim here is the public, and the reporters on both sides of the news (both bloggers and old-media reporters), as news blogs serve as a great way to aggregate and direct new eyes to news sources they otherwise would be unaware of.

Las Vegas Review-Journal is simply slitting their own throats, and will likely be soon adding their reporting and printing staff to the unemployment roster, and leaving a void in news coverage.