Righthaven: Copyright lawsuits as a business model
November 4, 2010 | 5:19 pm
Just as digital technology has empowered copyright infringers, so too has it created new opportunities for those who enforce copyrights. Tools and techniques developed by such companies as Attributor and BayTSP enable copyright holders to see how their works are being republished or shared online, often without their authorization. And lawyers around the world are capitalizing on such tools to bring scores of claims for damages.
One example is Righthaven, a copyright-enforcement venture launched in Las Vegas by local attorney Steve Gibson. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Righthaven searches for sites that post articles from selected publishers, buys the rights to those works, then sues the sites' owners for infringement. ...
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So far the EFF is defending against two of Righthaven's lawsuits. One was brought against Democratic Underground, a user-generated content site that aggregates posts from Democrats about politics and policy. In mid-May, one of the site's users posted a five-sentence excerpt from a Las Vegas Review-Journal piece about Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle (along with a link back to the complete original on the Review-Journal's site). Two months later, Righthaven acquired the copyrights to the article and sued the site and its owner ...
The EFF, Palo Alto-based law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Chad Bowers, a Nevada attorney, offer a similar defense in both cases. The two sites make fair use of the news stories, they argue, and Righthaven isn't entitled to relief because it doesn't try to license or distribute copyrighted content -- its only source of revenue is lawsuits. According to the EFF's motion to dismiss some of Righthaven's claims against DeBiase:
Many of the targets of Righthaven’s suits appear to be individuals and non-profit organizations who lack the economic resources to defend themselves against Righthaven’s claims.... Righthaven uses the threat of statutory damages in the amount $150,000, the potential loss of the defendant’s domain name and the prospect of attorney’s fees to extract settlements.... Given the lack of any economic harm to Righthaven, its refusal to seek non-judicial resolution of its claims before bringing suit and the impracticality of actually litigating its torrent of cases, Righthaven’s business model seems premised on forcing nuisance-value settlements.
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... Righthaven doesn't ask sites to take down content it considers infringing -- it just sues them. ...
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