Sharron Angle hit with R-J copyright infringement lawsuit

According to other articles, they always include this, but it’s just a bargaining position. They usually just settle for a percentage of their original monetary request.

Righthaven is trying to mitigate the risk by mostly suing people who have little reason or recourse to fight them. People who have enough money to pay a $5000-$10000 settlement, but not big enough to have full-time lawyers with nothing better to do than fight them.

They count on any lawsuit costing a LOT more than the $5-$10, and for their victims to be more interested in keeping their money than fighting for principle.

Better to pay $5000 and be done, than pay $50,000 in legal fees and possibly lose; or even win, since you can pay off 10 times for the same cost.

I don’t see what is novel about it. They purchase the rights past, present, and future to a piece of clearly copyrighted material, and then sue people who have reproduced in full the copyrighted material without permission.

They leave it to a judge obviously to decide if the use was “fair use”, but count on the cost of such litigation to be too great to bother with. It’s sinister, especially how they find the violations before they buy the copyright, but hardly a novel interpretation of the law.

That’s why, on the merits, they now have two judges who have refused to throw out the lawsuits on technicalities (one defendent arguing that they didn’t own the copyright at the time of the infringement, and another arguing that they couldn’t go after someone in another state).

IN my opinion, they should lose in an actual court case, because I don’t see how they would argue they had any real harm. After all, the articles are still on the newspaper’s web site, and none of the articles have suggested that their purchase included a revenue stream from the paper.

Which means that they don’t economically benefit from people reading the articles at the paper’s web site. And since the web site is free, the only benefit the paper gets is from advertising, and if that doesn’t go to Righhaven, Righthaven won’t be able to show any actual damages.

That, along with the fact that Righthaven KNEW of the violations when they purchased the copyrights (which should mitigate the claim that there economic loss is a “loss of value” of the property because of the violations), should make it hard for them to collect damages. They certainly will be able to get the offending posts taken down, but they can do that with an e-mail.

My guess is they keep settling, and will never let one of these go to court. My further guess is that, for a while, they’ll even DROP cases where someone takes them all the way to court.

This won’t stop until someone finds a way to counter-sue them, and makes it prohibitively expensive for them to continue. But I don’t know how that will happen, they appear to be competent lawyers.

meanwhile, we can keep slamming the paper for selling the copyrights, and boycott them, and maybe they will decide this isn’t a good way to make money.

Thanks for your analysis, I’m at risk too. I hope you are right about the RJ not being able to show economic loss. In fact, most newspaper articles, once a week or so old, have no economic value UNLESS someone chooses to link to it or promote it, thereby driving traffic to the RJ website. Old articles are down the memory hole in a couple days.

Not that interviewees don't have rights ~ they do, but those rights will depend on whether or not the material is used commercially or otherwise.

Just be careful who interviews you. I'd make the Las Vegas crowd come up with a release before I'd give them an interview; else I might find myself getting sued for delivering a speech with them claiming I'd copied their stuff.

BTW, none of their intrepetations are novel ~ they're simply stupid. People who sue their audience end up with no audience.

You're a nice guy Chuck. I have the phone number of a Mafia enforcer ~ 'nuff said.

Well, yes, one more thing ~ he's got convictions but he's loose.

Not that I'd ever call him, but you have to be prepared for these things if you're going to discuss other materials on the net. People really don't have the time for dealing with the bad actors.

Frankly, if it was RJ doing the suits, I think they COULD show economic loss.

But instead, they set up another firm called Righthaven, and that firm BUYS the rights to the articles, and then does the suits.

But that firm doesn’t pull the articles from the RV websites, and so far as I can tell doesn’t earn money from advertising revenue generated by page hits for those articles.

And since they bought the articles knowing they were reproduced, I don’t know how they’d argue that they were devalued because of the copyright violations — they knew that when they paid for them, and it should have been part of the purchase price.

And in any case, since it is presumed that the violators would pull the articles if asked, the loss, if any, is going to be RV’s loss before the copyright infringement was found, NOT a future loss to Righthaven.

So RightHaven’s argument would have to be, it seems, that they overpaid for the product expecting they could successfully sue the violators and thereby get back the extra cost they incurred over the true value of the property.

And that doesn’t seem like a winning argument in court, although I’m not a lawyer.