• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 8, 2010

Copyright enforcement company Righthaven might have signed up the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette owner, WEHCO, as a new client, but not all newspapers are eager to start suing nonprofits, bloggers and politicians for reposting material. Today, Gannett vice-president Barbara Wall indicated that she didn't expect USA Today or other papers in the chain to adopt Righthaven's approach.

"I don't think it's something we're going to pursue right now," she said during a teleconference about whether copyright litigation could save the ailing newspaper industry. Participating were Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson and Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman; the conference was arranged by the law firm Bryan Cave, which is now representing Righthaven as outside counsel.

Since launching in March, Righthaven has sued around 120 bloggers, nonprofits and other sites for allegedly reposting articles from newspapers in the Stephens Media chain, including its flagship paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The company has drawn criticism for suing individuals without first asking them to take down the content.

While Gannett's Wall didn't embrace lawsuits against bloggers as a solution, she did sound a cautionary note about newspapers' future. "It would be irresponsible," she said, "to be content with a system where all of our hard-earned news is simply taken away by others, and our position is: 'You're going to miss us when we're gone.' "

She added: "Our news has value, and if we can't reap that value ourselves then we can't continue to operate."

Goldman, meanwhile, questioned whether it makes sense for newspapers to sue readers who, in many cases, seemed to think they were helping the papers by posting stories and links that could increase traffic to their sites.

"The newspaper industry needs as many friends as it can get," he said.

He also suggested that reposting articles might benefit newspapers in two ways. First, the bloggers who do so might make more people aware of the newspaper. Second, if the posts contained links, they might increase newspapers' rankings in search engines.

For his part, Gibson insisted, as he has in the past, that the lawsuits will deter bloggers from taking newspapers' content without authorization. "Gannett doesn't need a bunch of unauthorized resellers" of its articles, Gibson said.

Of course, even if that's true, it doesn't address whether the people who post articles without authorization are actually hurting newspapers. For all of Gibson's talk about saving the newspaper industry, he has yet to come up with any hard numbers that could show this litigation initiative will improve newspapers' fortunes.