Thomson Reuters Thinks Not Responding To Their Email Means You've Freely Licensed All Your Content | Techdirt

"We've seen some unique interpretation of copyright law over the years, but generally the really big companies -- especially content-driven companies -- have semi-decent lawyers. So it's just bizarre and surprising that media giant Thomson Reuters apparently believes that it can license whatever content it wants by merely sending an email and saying that a refusal to respond will be taken as consent that it can use your content. Here's the form letter that Thomson Reuters apparently sent to the Indian site MediaNama, and which it has likely sent to others as well ... Now, some of us don't mind when our content is used in this manner -- and let others freely share it. And, there are cases where I think there's a strong fair use case to be made for things like news clippings and the like -- but India doesn't have a broad fair use structure like the US, so that wouldn't apply here. And, of course, by pushing this bizarre 'licensing by failure to respond' setup, it would seem like the company is admitting that it thinks it does need to license the content in question.   So here's the question: if we send Thomson Reuters a similar letter, and the company fails to respond, and then we start reposting Reuters stories on Techdirt, how quickly do you think their lawyers would nastygram us?"