Senate Candidate Sued By Copyright Troll

The Iso writes "Las Vegas based company Righthaven found two articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal about Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle reprinted on her web site without permission, so it did what it always does: bought the rights to the articles from the Review-Journal and sued the alleged infringer, seeking unspecified damages."

Comments

TFA is not very informative.

[jmerlin]

It'd be nice to see what content was allegedly copied. If that material is freely available on the LV RJ website, I don't think there's much of a case here, it's just trolls grasping at straws again. But we don't know, because that's how trolls work: stay hidden, be vague, try to steal as much money as possible via government enforced monopolies.

In reality, how much would this possibly have cost? A print copy (if the articles are in print only) sitting in a doctors' office might get what.. 50.. 100 reads for the single copy? People get paper copies then give them away because they're just trash.. are they going to claim 100x the cost of the print times some "assumed number of page hits" as damages? I don't see that any reasonable estimate would be worth the time nor effort of buying a copyright then suing. They must be going for millions, when actual damages may be under $5000. Mmm.. gotta love them trolls.

I'm also curious why, when the articles were discovered and there was no permission given to copy them, why the owner of the site wasn't asked to take them down? Usually this is the first course, and if they don't, then you sue for damages. Do trolls not even have 1 shred of decency?

Re:TFA is not very informative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Righthaven has been at this for a number of weeks. Basically, they clearly don't understand how useful people linking to the LVRJ articles are, nor do they understand the application of proper liability. As far as Righthaven is concerned, if anyone anywhere copies three words from an article and links back to the original, that's bad. Techdirt's been following the situation pretty well. This post in particular highlights how ridiculous their stance is.

Knowing this, the AP/Yahoo don't want to risk a lawsuit by enhancing the article by doing something as simple as link to the LVRJ. Of course, it's you and I who suffer.

What is the name of the person in charge?

[RocketRabbit]

What's the name of the person in charge of Righthaven? Seems to me that there is an evil, profiteering son of a bitch in charge of this hot mess of a company.

We need to start suing his ass.

Buying rights with the purpose to sue!

[wvmarle]

Let's call this a very interesting business model. Or should I say bizarre business model. Maybe one should start making a list of companies with bizarre business models, this should be on the top.

Also the Review-Journal publication should be careful to keep track of which articles they have sold off the rights, otherwise they may end up on the receiving end of a law suit.

Otoh as this troll appears to only handle Review-Journal articles, and obviously can easily buy copyrights from this journal (I can't think of many papers that are so happy to sell the copyrights on their articles - this must be a complete transfer of copyright, not just a license), it sounds like they are a related company one way or another, and basically suing on behalf of Review-Journal just under a different name.

At first I misread the headline as "patent troll". This is not too different. But at least these copyright trolls sue people that really should know better - it is after all much easier to unknowingly infringe on patents than copyrights. Copying stuff verbatim without asking permission is silly, especially when done by a public figure.

Well, Yeah

[BenJCarter]

The party of trial lawyers isn't going to change without some feedback.

Re:They are sociopaths

[Aeternitas827]

Is the only solution to force them to feel exactly like their victims?

This would generally make them feel like a victim, and tend to escalation of their attacks; because to a degree, they will see it as being retaliation; for example, the person who runs around mugging people for months ends up mugged himself; from there on, he'll continue mugging people, but he'll debiliate them in one way or another--knocking them out from behind, breaking a few bones, possibly killing them (though this would require a quite robust catalyst)--to prevent retaliation.

What goes around comes around....

[pridkett]

There's some deep irony here. After the Nevada primary Angle changed her website to make her seem more consistent with the mainstream values of the Republican party. The Reid campaign, sensing an opportunity, archived her old website and put it online at http://www.therealsharronangle.com/ This, of course, really irked the Angle campaign who attempted to use copyright law against the Nevada state Democratic party to squash the publication of the site.