Copyright troll lawsuit blows up in face of Righthaven

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/democratic-underground-responds-righthaven

by grellas • 16 years ago

162 30 16 years ago

eff.org

jorgem• 16 years ago

Rule of thumb: Never back down from a bully.

swombat• 16 years ago

That's a stupid rule of thumb.

What if the bully has the means to kill you and get away with it?

sukuriant• 16 years ago

Hence why it's a rule of thumb instead of a rule embedded in deep concrete and signed by the Highest Authority?

kbatten• 16 years ago

I don't think "bully" is the correct term in that case.

anamax• 16 years ago

> What if the bully has the means to kill you and get away with it?

Almost everyone has the means to kill you, for most values of "you".

PostOnce2• 16 years ago

Do you live in stark, utter terror of your government? Because they can do that. :P

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

I'm all for copyright trolls getting their due, but does anyone know if this kind of thing is enough to seriously hurt their profits?

Pyrodogg• 16 years ago

This single event? Not directly. But rulings carry precedent. If they are actually ruled against in this case, it would be much harder for them to go after someone else with the same tactic.

If this company is built upon this type of trolling, then yes it will greatly impact their revenue.

makmanalp• 16 years ago

It's not the profits that matter. It should be shown that these cases are defensible and the average victim should defend themselves. This way, the company would not be able to settle with anyone and thus not make any profit, and hopefully die.

Groxx• 16 years ago

And similar companies as well. It's a step towards preventing this sort of shit from existing in the first place.

paradox95• 16 years ago

I love this story. Kudos to them.

drndown2007• 16 years ago

I'm smiling ear to ear about this one. I hope Righthaven gets taken down hard!

SkyMarshal3• 16 years ago

All the more reason to sign up as a regular donor to EFF.org, even if it's just $5/month. If every developer, designer, software engineer, computer scientist, and new media professional who depends on unencumbered knowledge and information for their livelihood did just this small bit, EFF would be even more capable in its defense of intellectual freedom, and better able to prosecute all of these ridiculous patent/copyright trolls back to hell.

For anyone here who hasn't, here's a clickable: http://www.eff.org/

marciovm123• 16 years ago

just signed up for $5/month. Thanks for the inspiration.

SkyMarshal3• 16 years ago

Awesome!

cma• 16 years ago

Hmm, the only question now is Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal?

ubernostrum• 16 years ago

I'm torn.

I used to give money to EFF, and I support a lot of the same causes they do. But the last couple years or so their PR tactics have shifted noticeably into the sort of gross alarmism/hyperbole that does more harm than good to those causes. So I'll find other ways to support the things I care about.

SkyMarshal3• 16 years ago

If you find a better alternative, let us all know.

lotusleaf19872• 16 years ago

A New Hope? Now I'm waiting for the Empire to Strike Back.... I kid but seriously, this is great great news. Patent trolls are anti-innovation, impede creators/entrepreneurs, and drive up costs for consumers.

angusgr• 16 years ago

I hate to be a pedant, but this case concerns a copyright troll, not a patent troll. The distinction between the two is well worth acknowledging.

However, I agree with everything you've said about intellectual property trolling, in general. :)

lotusleaf19872• 16 years ago

Oh oops! I didn't catch that before, but yes I do understand the distinction. My mind was just being lazy.

beeeph• 16 years ago

Ahhh the joy I get from seeing these weak, greedy copyright trolls beg for mercy from the innocent people they prey on!

bmr• 16 years ago

Grellas, any idea how a "SLAPP-back" suit would fare for any of these defendants?

grellas• 16 years ago

Anti-SLAPP statutes are products of state law and do not apply to federal claims for copyright infringement. (See a sample discussion of the issue in this blog post: http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2008/08/copyright-and-california...). So these won't help.

The key to what happened here is that the defendant was able to elicit the help of EFF and the Fenwick firm, undoubtedly pro bono, and this gave them first-class legal talent with which to pick apart the Righthaven claims. Unlike patent trolling suits, where the claimant is typically able to assert credible claims for millions of dollars, the Righthaven model relies primarily on bulk processing of settlements resulting from threats to file suit. Righthaven will scout out the web and find one-fer instances of "copyright violation," as when a contributor to a site posts an excerpt from a news article in a comments section. The damages associated with this, even in a worst case, run no more than into the tens of thousands of dollars and likely would be far less. However, Righthaven takes an assignment from the newspaper that owns the copyrighted content and threatens to file its bullying suit, i.e., it threatens to subject the defendant to an expensive federal copyright suit that will cost far more to defend than is worth it for a typical defendant. In that context, Righthaven's business model depends on the vast majority of defendants caving and being willing to settle for a comparatively small dollar amount in order to avoid the suit. Righthaven does this in volume and that is how it makes its revenue - by coercing a lot of smallish settlements and relying on bulk processing to justify the economics of its efforts.

This model rapidly falls apart in any case where a serious defense is mounted and particularly where the defendant (a) is represented by first-class lawyers (as it was here) and (b) forces Righthaven to spend far more on processing the case than it can ever hope to recover. Here, Righthaven got hit with all this, plus aggressive counterclaims, leaving it unable even to dismiss the case without getting permission from the court. Seeing it had a major loser on its hands, Righthaven brought just such a motion to get permission to dismiss and met with a response from the defendant saying that the court must condition any such permission to dismiss on Righthaven's paying all of the defendant's attorneys' fees. All in all, a pretty disastrous result for Righthaven.

I am not sure how much this may be replicable in other cases but it certainly underscores that the Righthaven model is vulnerable to attack and may spur others to mount similar efforts. It is in any case a good first step.

athom• 16 years ago

I'm kind of surprised this hasn't made the top of DU's list. Maybe it did, and got buried under all the WikiLeaks stuff before I could get over there...?

aditya• 16 years ago

So, wait. Only the lawyers will end up profiting, as usual? (no offense, grellas :-)

streety• 16 years ago

I suggest the important point is not who profits but who pays the bill.

URSpider94• 16 years ago

I love reading the filings in cases like this. It's really amusing to see the kind of two-bit lawyers employed by Righthaven get taken to pieces by some of the finest legal minds in the country.

EFF's strategy is spot-on: turn Righthaven's odds game back onto themselves. Righthaven is betting that they can profit by filing scores of lawsuits, then coercing settlements in just a small fraction of them. If this case plays out in EFF's favor, then just a few contested cases could cost Righthaven all of their profits in defendants' attorney's fees.

Copyright troll lawsuit blows up in face of Righthaven

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