Sherman’s “little friend”

When Las Vegas Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick assured his own readers yesterday that anyone who posts an article from his newspaper without securing copyright permission “will meet my little friend called Righthaven,” he sounded like a thug, which he clearly intended and enjoyed, but mostly he came off like the kind of fool that has so successfully reduced Las Vegas to one of the most depressed and depressing places in America.

Frederick argued that by using Righthaven, a company suing an ever-expanding array of non-profits, internet bulletin boards and even a local PR firm for unpermitted reproduction of R-J content, he is saving newspapers in an age of rampant internet pilfering.

With saviors like that, who needs a wrecking ball? As held earlier on this site, what Frederick really is doing is rendering R-J content worthless. For a perfect example of how, turn to the paper’s arch rival, the Las Vegas Sun, which…

Vegas pipeline hearing timeline sketched

FOLLOWING a series of damning court decisions that vacated almost 80,000 acre feet a year of groundwater awards to Las Vegas from four valleys in rural Nevada, the State Engineer has published a tentative schedule to re-notice and re-hear the cases. If the brisk timeline is kept, the decisions over whether or not to tap the Great Basin Aquifer to slake Las Vegas could come as early as mid-February 2012.

Under the new schedule, notices of the applications by Las Vegas for permission to tap rural groundwater over thousands of square miles will be published in regional Nevadan newspapers in November. The period in which affected parties may lodge legal protests entitling them to participate in the hearings will close in late December.

“The proper and most equitable remedy”

A typical entrance to a ranch in Spring Valley, Nevada. Yesterday's decision by the Nevada Supreme Court leaves 2007 awards of Spring Valley groundwater to Las Vegas standing, but calls for the reopening of a protest period that could usher in a powerful new generation of pipeline opponents. Photo: Emily Green

UPDATED: The Nevada Supreme Court yesterday issued a revision of a January ruling in which it again concluded that the State Engineer of Nevada violated due process rights of protestors by failing to hold timely public hearings on a plan by Las Vegas to tap rural groundwater. As remedy, the Court called for a new protest period that could refresh the ranks of pipeline opponents. However, the decision stopped short of voiding water awards already made to Las Vegas.

In 1989, the Las Vegas agency that is now part of the Southern Nevada Water Authority made sweeping applications to drill for rural Nevadan groundwater in dozens…

Review-Journal sues its own source

Anyone who doubts that enforcement of copyright law is out of step with fair play and how journalism is gathered should consider that yesterday representatives for the Las Vegas Review-Journal filed suit against the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

The case against the liberal advocacy group joins a growing list of complaints by the R-J’s parent company, Stephens Media, and its legal affiliate, Righthaven LLC, which in recent months have filed suit against a number of organizations as disparate as a Killerfrogs.com, a sports booster website of Texas Christian University, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and a realty office based in Henderson, Nevada.

Each suit claims copyright infringement on the grounds that the organizations posted articles by Stephens Media outlets on their websites.

Leaving aside the Killer Frogs, marijuana advocates and the realtor, what makes yesterday’s lawsuit against the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada remarkable is that  among the exhibits in…

Kay sera sera

Kay Brothers retires this week as Deputy General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. There will probably be parties and there should be toasts, during which she may be heralded as a force in developing groundwater storage programs for the Las Vegas Valley Water District in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Even her worst critics would have to raise a glass. The kind of storage of Colorado River water undertaken by Brothers and Terry Katzer, the man who hired her in 1986 at the SNWA seed agency, was a model of progressive water management in a desert where evaporation empties reservoirs with sparkling remorselessness — and in a valley where subsidence is measured in feet, not inches.

However, it is unlikely that she will be remembered for that. Rather, second only to her boss Pat Mulroy, Brothers has been Justifier-in-Chief for the Las Vegas pipeline project unveiled in 1989.

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