Righthaven Finally Put Out Of Its Misery

The wheels of justice grind slow, but fine:

Righthaven LLC., a law firm that became known as a “copyright troll” for filing hundreds of lawsuits against media companies and bloggers, was forever banished from its business model on Tuesday by a judge who ordered a transfer of all their copyrights to settle the company’s substantial debts.

...For about a year Righthaven’s business model was a success: they would find a news website or blog that had republished snippets of a copyrighted news story that they had purchased rights to or represented, then file a lawsuit threatening up to $150,000 in penalties for every alleged infringement. Because the punitive damages are so hefty, most early defendants settled for much smaller sums, usually several thousand dollars.

But that all change after they went after liberal news forum Democratic Underground, which they sued in Sept. 2010 over a five sentence news excerpt from The Las Vegas Review Journal, posted in the forum for readers to comment on.

Righthaven was chastized by U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt months later in 2011, who wrote that Righthaven “made multiple inaccurate and likely dishonest statements to the court” regarding their ownership of certain Review Journal copyrights.

In his ruling, Judge Hunt wrote that Righthaven’s claims were invalid because it did not actually hold a copyright on the story they sued the forum over — that they were simply representing the paper, even though they claimed the copyright had been transferred to them. He even warned that Righthaven may have misled judges in hundreds of other lawsuits by claiming that it owned certain copyrights which it was really just representing.