Lawsuits
Righthaven initially entered agreements concerning old news articles from Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, based on a business model of suing bloggers, other Internet authors, and Internet site operators for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission. An affiliate of Stephens Media owns half of Righthaven. As of 24 March 2011 (2011-03-24), 255 cases have been filed. Typically, Righthaven has demanded $75,000 and surrender of the domain name from each alleged infringer, but accepted out of court settlements of several thousand dollars per defendant. As of December 2010 approximately 70 cases had settled.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) soon took up the case on behalf of several defendants. Kurt Opsahl, an EFF attorney, said, "Despite what Righthaven claims, it's hard to interpret these lawsuits as anything else besides a way to bully Internet users into paying unnecessary settlements."
In August 2010, the company entered an agreement with WEHCO Media in Arkansas to pursue similar actions. Later, it made a similar arrangement with Media News Group, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News.
In December 2010, Righthaven began to sue website operators over republished graphics and photographs, and also expanded its scope to material originally published by the Denver Post and other newspapers. That month it filed more than a dozen lawsuits over a graphic illustration of the "Vdara death ray" that had gone viral.
In April 2011, a federal judge unsealed the agreement between Righthaven and Stephens Media, revealing that Stephens media receives 50% of the proceeds of lawsuits (after deducting costs). In addition, an attorney for one of the defendants claims that the agreement provides only limited rights to the copyrights of Stephens Media, specifically, only the right to sue. Some defense attorneys argue that one must have complete ownership in order to have standing to sue, which may undermine the lawsuits related to the Review-Journal material.
On June 14, 2011, a federal court ruled that Righthaven has no standing to sue for copyright infringement, on the grounds that the original parties retain the actual copyrights, and that Righthaven failed to disclose their financial connections to Stephens Media. Among other sanctions imposed by Federal District Court Judge Roger Hunt, Righthaven was fined US$5,000 for the misrepresentation.
On August 15, 2011, Righthaven was ordered to pay $34,045.50 in attorney's fees and court costs in the case of Righthaven v Wayne Hoehn.
Read more about this topic: Steven A. Gibson