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Righthaven Ordered To Forfeit Its Intellectual Property
New submitter BenJCarter writes with an update on Righthaven, the company that tried to make a business model out of copyright trolling. According to Wired,
"[Righthaven] was dealt a death blow on Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit 'all of' its intellectual property and other 'intangible property' to settle its debts. ... U.S. District Judge Philip M. Pro of Nevada ordered Righthaven to surrender for auction the 278 copyrighted news articles that were the subject of its lawsuits. ... Righthaven's first client, Stephens Media of Las Vegas and operator of the Review-Journal, invested $500,000 into the Righthaven operation at its outset. With Judge Pro's ruling (PDF), the media company is losing financial control of hundreds of articles and photos. 'The irony of this? Perhaps those who buy the copyrights could issue DMCA notices to the Review-Journal stopping them from redistributing them?' [opposing lawyer Marc Randazza] said via an e-mail, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
"Perhaps those who buy the copyrights could issue DMCA notices to the Review-Journal stopping them from redistributing them?'"
This is pure gold!
Why don't we make this business model explicitly illegal???
Oh yeah... government works for the highest bidder right now and never in the public interest. It should be explicitly illegal... buy "Intellectual Property" for the non-good faith reason of suing people and you lose it. Of course that is too simple to be accepted and I have no money to buy lobbyists.
And nothing of value was lost..
Nothing to us, the sensible masses, but to the folks that invested half a million dollars, around a half million dollars of value was lost.
Chalk one up for the good guys.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
In principle, yes, but I thought one of the strikes against them was that they didn't actually own the copyrights to anything they were suing over. They had the "right to sue" only, but the judges rules that you can't transfer only the "right to sue" of a copyright. It has to be the whole thing. If they don't actually own the copyrights, they don't have to forfeit anything.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
TFA: "...ordered Righthaven to surrender for auction the 278 copyrighted news articles that were the subject of its lawsuits"
Company gives Righthaven "right to sue" on their article
Righthaven sues bloggers who use article
Court tells Righthaven that the "right to sue" doesn't exist
Company gives Righthaven all rights
Righthaven goes down in flames
Bloggers get ownership of articles
I know it's really going to their lawyers, but the premise is enough to make me smile :)
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Um... I don't play much poker, but even I know that you don't raise heavily on a crap hand. You may think you're successfully bluffing, but you're not; that kind of mad-dog behavior is a tell.
So, Righthaven and their corporate overlords went all-in on an 8-high no-pair hand and rightly lost their entire stake. Yaaaaay.
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