The Righthaven lawsuit factory

The Las Vegas Review Journal created a law firm called Righthaven to sue web sites that reproduce the newspaper's articles. Righthaven has sued scores of sites since March of this year. According to Righthaven Victims, the list of those sued includes the high-profile NORML, CREW, ADA, ALIPAC, Free Republic, Democratic Underground, No Quarter, Sweetness and Light, Prison Planet, Sharron Angle, and the Democratic Party of Nevada. Copyright infringement of news articles has become so common on the web that people have forgotten that copyright infringement is a crime and the aggrieved party can seek damages. The obvious solution is not to infringe on other people's copyrights, but that is not the whole story here.

The way Righthaven goes about its business is a news story in itself. Their objective is not to prevent copyright infringement, it is to make money. They do not issue warnings and they are not satisfied by removal of the infringing information. Instead they fire a full legal barrage against any infringer in any case, suing for $75,000 and the domain name of the website owner, even if only an excerpt was copied and it was posted by a user, not the site owner. These unusually aggressive practices might lead an observer to believe that Righthaven's lawyers Stephen A. Gibson, J. Charles Coons, and Joseph C. Chu are practicing barratry.

There are some protections for some site owners meeting the legal requirements of U.S. Title 17 chapter 5, you have to jump through some specific hoops to have these protections. Nobody does who does not have legal knowledge of these provisions. This is one more way that the DMCA stinks. Common law beforehand gave these protections to all service providers, and the DMCA removed these protections. Since nobody jumps through these hoops, this opens an opportunity for villainry. If you really hate somebody's website and they allow anonymous comments, you can post LJRV articles through a relay and hope they get sued.

Here are links to more information about Righthaven:

• http://www.righthavenlawsuits.com/
• Righthaven Victims
• A list of links to news stories about the lawsuits
• The Blog Law Blog has a number of posts on Righthaven