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The thread article indicates they think there’s no reason to notify a site of their displeasure with copy/pasting an entire article from their site. Is this accurate?.

I don't know the logistics of the copyright law, but what I have garnered from perusing the web on Righthaven is that these guys go to newspapers that have web sites and offer to purchase the copyright ownership rights to the material posted on their websites. I have a feeling that they don't actually "pay" for the rights, but they get the rights transferred to them in order that Righthaven (rather than being a lawfirm acting on behalf of the newspaper) becomes the plaintiff in any copyright infringement action. So Righthaven (which appears to be basically an arm of Attorney Steven Gibson) trolls the net looking for stories and articles which they allegedly have copyright ownership rights to and when they see one posted on the web, they file a shakedown lawsuit.

What is interesting is that Righthaven would appear to have no actual damages. If someone re-posts one of these newspaper articles, the only legitimate entity which could claim damages would be the newspaper or the author, who misses out on hits to their website thus losing potential advertising revenue. Righthaven is not collecting revenue for selling the articles, they are collecting on the lawsuits (and I imagine they are sharing the revenue with the newspapers as part of the deal to transfer ownership of the copyright to Righthaven).

Obviously Righthaven doesn't care about the actual damages either to themselves or the newspapers and they are apparently only looking to recover the punitive damages for the copyright violation (I don't know how much it is per posting, but it could be substantial and I don't think it needs to be tied to any actual showing of damages).

So after they troll the internet and find a "violation" they file a suit and then shakedown the website for whatever it can get.

This is a classic legal scam.

I don't think you can get lower than this.

The thread article indicates they think there’s no reason to notify a site of their displeasure with copy/pasting an entire article from their site.

This being a lawsuit machine, I'm guessing they searched the Internet for their articles and filed suit against the sites hosting each one found. While it appears most of the site operators are plainly responsible for copyright infringement, this lawyer didn't stop to consider the possibility that some of the sites are protected from liability under the DMCA safe harbor provision.

Sites like FR are required by law to promptly remove any offending material upon notice in order to be protected, but AFAIK such a notice was never made. But this is a for-profit lawsuit machine, and there's no money to be made in takedown notices. Those only serve the purpose and intent of copyright in stopping infringement.

I give 100:1 odds this gets thrown out on summary judgment. A part of me hopes Jim goes for sanctions and recouped attorney fees due to the gross disregard for the law in this case, especially in light of the recent YouTube decision.