Newspapers Sue Over Web Posts

In a case with broad implications in cyberspace, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against a Web site that posts their stories without permission.

The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles, accuses the Free Republic site of using hundreds of stories from the newspapers, violating their copyrights and diverting users and potential revenue from their own Web sites.

Rex Heinke, an attorney for the newspapers, said the Free Republic site has been posting the stories "on a very large scale for a very long time."

The Fresno-based site posts the stories and allows users to write comments about them. The site's operator, Jim Robinson, said he has ignored warnings from the newspapers because the practice is protected by the First Amendment. He asserted that the use is proper under the fair use

"Fair use" doctrine allows portions of copyrighted works to be duplicated when presented in the context of commentary, such as a book review that contains excerpts.

"I'm resolved to do whatever it takes to win this case," said Robinson, a computer programmer. "I will not back down." He charged that he is being singled out because of his political leanings. The Free Republic site features many right-wing messages.

The suit is widely seen as a potentially groundbreaking attempt to address how copyright protections apply to the Internet.

"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 the University of California, Los Angeles.

"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," he said.