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Auction of Copyright Troll Righthaven's Website Underway
Tootech sends this quote from Vegas Inc:
"The online auction of the righthaven.com website domain name got underway Monday, with bidders having until Jan. 6 to submit offers. A judge has authorized a receiver to auction the intellectual property of Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC, the newspaper copyright infringement lawsuit filer. The auction is aimed at raising money to cover part of Righthaven's $63,720 debt to a man who defeated Righthaven in court. The man, Wayne Hoehn, and his attorneys defeated Righthaven when a judge threw out Righthaven's lawsuit against him over Hoehn's unauthorized post on a sports betting website message board of a Las Vegas Review-Journal column by columnist and former publisher Sherman Frederick. Hoehn was a defendant in one of Righthaven's 275 lawsuits filed since March 2010."
Why on earth would anyone want to help pay down those ass-holes debt?
The community would rather fund open source projects. We all know only large media companies (other copyright trolls) will place bids.
$(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
Social networking site for fascists.
Store that only sells implements for 'righties'.
A blog for pedants.
the more that needs to be sold to pay the debt.
... but why would you want to buy righthaven.com? Really, what possible value could it have?
That's the best news all day!
Auctioning this hate magnet of a domain is an interesting idea. The question is: could you ever launder the image of the domain sufficiently to make it worth the price of purchase? ***sigh*** I guess there is probably a PR company or two out there that specialises in that kind of work.
Er.. for the 99.999% of the world that have never heard of Righthaven, it is a cool sounding Fantasy/Sci Fi/Heavy Metal type name, and .com domains made up of real words are quite scarce these days. If I was a publisher I'd look at buying it for a future book/tv/movie/album release. medicine24h.com I wouldn't pay much for it, but it'd have fetch a few hundred bucks at least.
https://www.snapnames.com/store/extended.action?ig=986#store;storeName=extended
thegodmovie.com - watch it
You know what, you're right. This ended "way too fast". Look at SCO - someone(s) funded that zombie forever. Here they're doing the opposite strategy. "Ha Ha, if we win, be strike gold, if we lose, oops, we had no assets."
I'd like this to be bought by someone with a BIG pocket and use it to go after when the media companies themselves decide wholesale infringement is just dandy.
Really, they crumbled for just 60K+ ? Really? Tell me which species of fish that is smelling here. Red Herring?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I find it insightful to see a "company" like this who was going after MILLIONS in so-called damages, is suddenly struggling to pay a paltry $64k debt. And all I can say is... BWAHAHAHAHA! There *can* be justice in this world.
You are paying their creditors, which would include people who have legal judgements against them. When someone goes insolvent, their creditors get fucked. However they can usually recover some of what they lost when assets are auctioned off.
As an example when MPC went under, the university I work at was a "creditor" of sorts. We had systems with outstanding warranties on them and those have value. So we got a letter from the bankruptcy court letting us know what all was going on. We didn't expect to get any money, and we didn't. Their assets weren't worth enough, all the money recovered went to higher priority creditors (there is a legal order to what gets paid off first).
So we were stuck holding the bag. Wasn't a huge deal, but we did have system failures that would have been covered by the warranty that we had to pay for ourselves.
In a more direct case take bond holders. If you hold uninsured bonds in a company and they go bankrupt, you are out the money unless their assets can raise enough to pay you back in whole or in part.
You know what, you're right. This ended "way too fast". Look at SCO - someone(s) funded that zombie forever. Here they're doing the opposite strategy. "Ha Ha, if we win, be strike gold, if we lose, oops, we had no assets."
They do have assets. They have an ownership stake in all those patents they tried to enforce. Remember when the judge threw out their cases saying they couldn't be given only the authority to sue, but had to actually own them?
Now they should be fair game as well.
So even if this guy doesn't see a dime, in a worst case scenario would should see a bunch of bullshit patents either fall by the wayside or, if the guy is cool about it, given to the public domain.
But I want it to include a date with Danica Patrick.
10c Zimbabwean.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Righthaven had absolutely nothing to do with patents, they represented copyright holders. And their cases were thrown out because they didn't own the copyrights, so how on earth are they going to sell something they don't own?
I'd love to see the Pirate Bay nab this one and have it redirect to their site. Ideally, they get it for less than $100....
I can't help but notice that the scummy law firm gets dismembered, but the scummy newspaper that contracted with them and started this mess gets off scott free. When is someone going to find a way to hold LVRJ responsible for their copyright-trolling-by-proxy?
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Those of you in Vegas know you have two newspapers, the RJ and the Sun.
The Denver Post cancelled their contract with Righthaven while the RJ rewrote their contract with Righthaven such that it now has ownership and can sue as proxy.
If I were you I would not support the scum at the RJ - or their advertisers - who support this type of chilling effect on free speech.