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.