Righthaven Archives
Righthaven lawsuit figure Brian D. Hill has been accused of copyright infringement again – this time involving an image of a Las Vegas casino.
Hill, 21, gained national attention after he was sued in January for copyright infringement by Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC over a Denver Post TSA pat-down photo.
Righthaven, which sues over Las Vegas Review-Journal and Denver Post material, eventually dropped the suit against Hill.
That was after the North Carolina blogger said he has disabilities including mild autism, that he didn’t copy the photo from the Denver Post and found it elsewhere after it went viral on the Internet; and that he couldn’t afford what he said was a $6,000 settlement demand by Righthaven.
In his latest skirmish over copyrights, Hill said Sunday that a satire image he placed on Yahoo Inc.’s Flickr.com site was removed by Flickr after online travel website Destination360.com complained the image infringed on its copyright.
The image shows slot machines in what Destination360 suggests is a Las Vegas hotel-casino.
Hill said he digitally altered the image, changing a sign pointing to a hotel tower to say "Wall Street" and adding an image of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saying"Welcome to the Wall St. Casino" and commentary from gamblers such as"Ah damn! Lost my family home,""Bye bye, Main Street" and"I am now in total debt."
"Because of my political beliefs I made the satire based on what I know was true," Hill said Sunday."I feel like Wall Street has become like a casino because people lose and win money there, so when people lose money they may lose their family home. That is why I chose a casino setting for the satire. I was never intending to make any casino look bad. If that casino got the wrong idea about my political satire, that was never my intent."
Hill’s website, USWGO.com, is now spotlighting the dispute between him, Flickr and Destination360.
"Brian will continue to go to war with any copyright troll and copyright enforcer that attempts to take away the 1st Amendment for political control and censorship!," a post there said Sunday.
A request for comment was place with Destination360.
The dispute illustrates how website owners can potentially see their material appropriated for use by others under the fair use doctrine of copyright law, which includes a specific provision for parody uses.
And this isn’t the first time Wall Street investment and banking practices have been unfavorably compared to casinos and gambling.
The New York Stock Exchange, for example, sued the New York-New York hotel-casino in Las Vegas after it opened in 1997, complaining the casino’s"Stock Exchange" and"$lot Exchange" façade slogans were "mutilating and bastardizing" NYSE trademarks.
Another example: In commenting on the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, a New York Times editorial complained investment banks had"turned the financial system into a casino" by designing obscure mortgage-based investments so that certain clients could bet against them.
The title of the editorial: "Wall Street Casino."