Web Copyright Suit Goes to Heart of Debate

Launching a legal strike that could shape how copyright laws apply to the Internet, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post jointly filed a copyright-infringement suit Tuesday that seeks to bar a conservative Web site from copying and posting stories from the two newspapers.

The suit is widely seen as a potentially groundbreaking attempt to answer one of the most nettlesome legal questions related to the Internet, a medium that makes copying digitized works and distributing them around the globe an almost effortless proposition.

Filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the suit targets a Fresno-based Web site called Free Republic that posts news stories from dozens of sources, then allows users to attach typed comments to them.

News organizations and other copyright holders have tended to overlook the pervasive practice of online copying, which occurs countless times daily on the global computer network. But Rex Heinke, a Los Angeles-based attorney for the newspapers, said that the Free Republic site has been doing this “on a very large scale for a very long time” and is eating into the two newspapers’ online revenue.

For his part, the operator of the Web site, Jim Robinson, said he has ignored repeated warnings from the newspapers because he believes his activities are protected by the 1st Amendment.

“I am resolved to do whatever it takes to win this case,” said Robinson, a 52-year-old computer programmer. “I will not back down.”

Legal scholars said the case will be watched carefully because the application of copyright protections on the Internet has generated great debate since the early days of the Web, when “Information wants to be free” became a rallying cry of online activists.

“It’s a very important lawsuit because it’s a question that needs to be settled,” said John Shepard Wiley Jr., a law professor at UCLA. “The Net is one giant copying machine, and producers, authors and content providers have been worried that the Net would threaten their basic economic incentives.”

The suit alleges that Free Republic has made verbatim copies of “dozens, if not hundreds” of stories by the Post and The Times and has thereby diverted traffic from the newspapers’ own Web sites, eroding potential revenue they would otherwise collect from online advertisers and readers buying archived materials.

Heinke said the two newspaper giants are not trying to curtail the flow of information on the Net and have even invited Robinson to electronically link to stories on The Times and Post sites instead of making copies of them. That’s a common arrangement on such popular content sites as Yahoo and CNET Inc.’s News.com and is not regarded as copyright infringement.

But Robinson’s attorney, Brian L. Buckley of Los Angeles, said his client is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. For more than a century, this doctrine has allowed copyrighted works--or at least portions of them--to be copied when presented in the context of commentary. A common example is a book review that quotes from the text of its subject.

Buckley said Robinson is not profiting from the Free Republic site, even though it does feature advertisements.

Robinson, whose site appears to be something of a forum for political right-wingers, said that many of the stories are posted by visitors to the site and that he is being singled out because of his political leanings. He said he and others put newspaper stories--many of them about President Clinton’s legal troubles--on the Free Republic site so that visitors “can tear them to pieces, looking for holes, lies and distortions.”

Experts said that fair use is a notoriously uncertain legal principle but that Robinson’s legal position appears tenuous.

“When people start not only copying whole stories but lots of them and archiving the material, it’s hard not to see that as essentially re-publication,” said Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information management at UC Berkeley.