The Las Vegas Review-Journal could be violating federal campaign finance laws by suing a number of advocacy organizations, companies and individuals over copyright infringement, while letting at least one conservative candidate for office use similar material, according to experts.
Since March, a company known as Righthaven LLC, which has the copyright protection for Review-Journal content, has filed several lawsuits against progressive and liberal groups, including the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
They have also filed copyright lawsuits against several non-political Web sites and an anti-wind energy website.
The suits claim content from the Review-Journal has been improperly taken and posted on these groups' websites. At least one defendant says they were sued without any previous request for the content to be removed, according to the reports in the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Journal Review, a Nevada media watchdog site (not to be confused with the Review-Journal newspaper).
But similar actions by Nevada Republican Senate Candidate Danny Tarkanian have apparently not brought such lawsuits, according to a search of the U.S. federal courts' PACER database. Tarkanian's campaign has posted entire stories from the Review-Journal that remain on the campaign's website.
The Review-Journal has a history of support for Republican candidates and its publisher, Sherman Frederick, regularly criticizes Democratic and progressive groups and candidates on his blog, often with incorrect information.
Attorneys for Righthaven LLC did not return requests for comment. Frederick declined comment to Media Matters.
Several campaign finance attorneys said the practice of allowing one political group to use copyrighted information, but blocking others could be considered making an in-kind contribution to one political group or candidate and not others. They based this on the fact that the copyrighted material is a valuable entity.
“If they are allowing one side to use copy-righted material and not the other side, free of charge, it is giving something of value free to one side,” said Joseph Sandler, an attorney with Sandler, Reiff and Young of Washington, D.C. “I think that is an in-kind contribution. Selective enforcement of a copyright claim.”
Scott Thomas, an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP and a former Federal Elections Commission chair, said a claim of election law violation could have merit.
“The definition of contribution is very broad,” he told me. “They do seem to be allowing content to be used by one political group, but denying or attempting to deny that same opportunity to other political groups. If [the content] is worth suing over, it is something of value.”
Craig Holman of Public Citizen, the government watchdog group, also found a potential campaign finance problem.
“If it is discrimination in terms of applying copyright rules by allowing some candidates to use the material and not others, they are making an in-kind contribution,” Holman said. “To be fair and legal, they have to apply the same rules to everybody.”