Blogger countersues Denver Post over copyright lawsuit

Georgetown, SC, United States (AHN) – A blogger and her Tea Party group sued by the owner of Denver Post and copyright enforcer Righthaven for allegedly using a column from the Colorado newspaper without permission has countersued.

Dana Eiser, a blogger in Summerville, South Carolina, and Lowcountry 9/12 filed the countersuit on Monday before the state’s Court of Common Pleas alleging that MediaNews Group Inc. and Righthaven engage in harassment lawsuits and unfair trade practices.

Eiser and the Tea Party was sued by the paper and Righthaven, which is also the copyright enforcer of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, last year before a federal court in Charleston. But the blogger denied infringing copyright when her agent posted the column by Mike Rosen entitled “A letter to the Tea Partyers” on the Lowcountry 9/12 blogsite.

In the countersuit, Eiser and Lowcountry 9/12 claimed the Denver Post website encouraged readers to share the paper’s content but was sued for doing so.

The paper learns that its content is copied and pasted through a Trojan horse computer code embedded in articles that detect the IP address of a user to identify copyright violators.

The countersuit also accused Righthaven and its boss Steven Gibson of defamation, for calling Eiser and Lowcountry 9/12 “the infringement community” and “a community of thieves” in a CNN interview.

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