republisher of defamation to the same liability as the original
This led Koch, in comments he made on October 8, 1980, for a Public Hearing on the Effects of Section 108 of the 1976 Copyright Act (the fair use exception clause used by libraries), to claim that librarians needed to act like
republishers where 'fair compensation is the rule and fair use is the exception.' (58) Koch went on to say that when a librarian takes on the role of
republisher they "...must also accept the implied obligation of insuring that payments of the royalties established by primary publishers are made." (59) Despite this admonishment, librarians continued to classify their copies in a way that required no royalty payments.
And consider alongside it the republication of a leaked document together with careful analysis and criticism of the document by the
republisher, which we'll call the "speaker-supplemented leak republication" scenario.
Rethinking
Republisher Liability in an Information Age, 31 FORDHAM URB.
Part II will examine New York's broader approach to evaluating whether a
republisher should be held liable, which displaces the need for a privilege like the wire service defense.
In addition to this protection, the maker of a republished statement can avoid liability by including within the republished statement a disclaimer to the effect that the maker is republishing the notice without having verified the statement, that the maker is not the source of the republished statement, and that the republished statement is based on information supplied by another entity.[22] In order for this safe harbor to apply, however, the
republisher of the statement must also identify the source from which it obtained the statement.
41 A distributor -- sometimes called a secondary publisher or
republisher -- is someone like a newsstand operator, bookseller, or librarian, who does not create content, but makes it available to others.(42) A distributor is not liable unless he knows or had reason to know of the defamatory content, and acted with the requisite degree of fault.(41)
The historian Adrian Johns describes the lively market for reprinters in early America, importers and
republishers of British material under copyright.
republishers, such as book presses and newspapers, on the other hand,
Nothing new here but, with the advent of self-publishing and lazy
republishers, otherwise good stuff puts itself beyond reach because no-one has bothered to tag it properly.