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."

Comments

Finally

[Speeddymon]

Maybe all this nonsense with patent trolling will cease & desist ... pun intended.

There we go..

[Walterk]

And nothing of value was lost..

Re:Yay!

[O('_')O_Bush]

I like to think of them like a puppy. Just because they peed in the right spot once, doesn't mean they are potty trained.

Actual Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

They lost some legal proceedings they had brought, and were ordered to pay the defendant's costs.

They failed to comply with the costs order and ended up having their assets seized to be auctioned off to pay the costs.

The fact that the property was intellectual rather than an office block in Las Vegas was less about the philosophy of the Judge and more about the fact that the IP was the only assets the business held.

This doesn't speak to the viability or legality of copyright trolling.

Re:No, they couldn't use DMCA

[canajin56]

Different judge, different case. This judge ruled against Righthaven based only on fair use, that a USER posting to your forum a 4 paragraph excerpt from a 34 paragraph article, linked to the full article, at 0 financial gain to the user or the website, was not copyright violation.

So in this case, the judge never ruled on who owns it, and he said that while he acknowledges that the ownership is now in dispute because of the wording of the transfer agreement, as far as he can tell, Righthaven is the registered owner of all 275 articles, so he has every right to transfer them to the holder of the receivership. The fact that they actually are registered to Righthaven takes some weight from their losses before the first judge. Only that judge also made a declaratory judgement, calling it fair use regardless of who actually owns the rights, awarding lawyers fees and actually even bringing somebody from Stephens Media in to scold them, because the contract gave them the right to have final say in who to sue in the event it ends up being a charity (which it was!) or a hobbyist, and they did not exercise it. Basically he chewed their ear off for suing a charity over fair use, when as publishers of a law journal, they should damn well know better. In any event, other posters have said that after this initial loss, Righthaven was given full control so they wouldn't lose again. And then they lost again over fair use. So in THAT case, it would have 0 effect on the previous case, since they didn't have them yet. But they do KNOW, so they are fair game for forfeiture to pay the judgement in the first case.