Have Media Companies Destroyed Their Copyrights With The ‘Share’ Button?

For all the gray areas around what’s legal and illegal when it comes to repurposing content in the digital era, there’s one basic copyright principle people agree on in nearly every situation -- and you don't need to be a lawyer to figure out: You can't make a whole, perfect, 100% copy without permission. But depending on how the Righthaven litigation pans out, these types of cases could become much less clear cut—because we might be about to see 100% copying become legally justified in many situations. Two ways that could happen: A judge could rule that newspapers gave “implied license” to copy their content. That means that the newspaper already gave readers permission to freely copy its work, at least for non-commercial purposes. The logic goes like this: both of Righthaven’s two biggest newspaper clients, The Denver Post and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, have a set of tools next to their online stories that directly encourage readers to “share” that content.