Really? Newspaper Chainâs New Business Plan: Copyright Suits By David Kravets July 22, 2010 | 3:29 pm | Categories: The Courts, intellectual property Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media worldâs financial crisis â and itâs not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says heâs making money. âWe believe itâs the best solution out there,â Gibson says. âMedia companiesâ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.â Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson is embarking on a copyright trolling litigation campaign Gibsonâs vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his clientâs articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act â up to $150,000 for a single infringement â to compel quick settlements. Since Righthavenâs formation in March, the company has filed at least 80 federal lawsuits against website operators and individual bloggers whoâve re-posted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his first client. Now heâs talking expansion. The Review-Journalâs publisher, Stephens Media in Las Vegas, runs over 70 other newspapers in nine states, and Gibson says he already has an agreement to expand his practice to cover those properties. (Stephens Media declined comment, and referred inquiries to Gibson.) Hundreds of lawsuits, he says, are already in the works by yearâs end. âWe perceive there to be millions, if not billions, of infringements out there,â he says. Righthavenâs lawsuits come on the heels of similar campaigns targeting music and movie infringers. The Recording Industry Association of America sued about 20,000 thousand file sharers over five years, before recently winding down its campaign. And a coalition of independent film producers called the U.S. Copyright Group was formed this year, already unleashing as many as 20,000 federal lawsuits against BitTorrent users accused of unlawfully sharing movies. The RIAAâs lawsuits werenât a money maker, though â the record labels spent $64 million in legal costs, and recovered only $1.3 million in damages and settlements. The independent film producers say they nonetheless expect to turn a profit from their lawsuits. âPeople are settling with us,â says Thomas Dunlap, the head lawyer of the Copyright Groupâs litigation. The out-of-court settlements, the number of which he declined to divulge, are ranging in value from $1,500 to $3,500 â about the price it would cost defendants to retain a lawyer. The RIAAâs settlements, which it collected in nearly every case, were for roughly the same amounts. But experts say that settling the Righthaven cases, many of which target bloggers or aggregation sites, might not be as easy. The RIAA lawsuits often accused peer-to-peer users of sharing dozens of music files, meaning the risk of going to trial was financially huge for the defendants. The same is true of the BitTorrent lawsuits. The movie file sharers are accused of leeching and seeding bits of movie files, contributing to the widespread and unauthorized distribution of independent movies such as Hurt Locker, Cry of the Wolf and others. But each of the Righthaven suits charge one, or a handful, of infringements. Defendants might be less willing to settle a lawsuit stemming from their posting of a single news article, despite the Copyright Actâs whopping damages. âYouâd have to go after a lot of people for a relatively small amount of money,â says Jonathan Band, a Washington, D.C. copyright lawyer. âThat is a riskier proposition.â Gibson claims Righthaven has already settled several lawsuits, the bulk of which are being chronicled by the Las Vegas Sun, for undisclosed sums. One defendant who is ready to settle is Fred Bouzek, a Virginia man who runs bikernews.net, a user-generated site about hardcore biker news. He was sued last week on allegations the site ran a Las Vegas Review-Journal story about police going under cover with the Hellâs Angels. Even if he had grounds to fight the case, he says it would be cheaper to settle. âThe only choice I have is to try to raise money and offer a settlement,â he says. Bill Irvine of Phoenix says he is fighting infringement allegations targeting AboveTopSecret.com, the site he controls under The Above Network. The site is accused of infringing a Review-Journal article on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The site is a user-generated discussion on âconspiracies, UFOâs, paranormal, secret societies, political scandals, new world order, terrorism, and dozens of related topicsâ and gets about 5 million hits monthly, Irvine says. Righthaven, he says, should have sent him a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because the article was posted by a user, not the site itself. âIn this case, we feel this suit does not have merit,â he says. âWe are confident we will have success challenging it.â Gibson says heâs just getting started. Righthaven has other media clients that he wonât name until the lawsuits start rolling out, he says. âFrankly, I think weâre having tremendous success at a number of levels,â Gibson says. âWe file new complaints every day.â See Also: Copyright Lawsuits Plummet in Aftermath of RIAA Campaign Verizon Terminating Copyright Infringersâ Internet Access Happy Anniversary Pirates: 20000 Copyright Lawsuits and Counting Court to Consider Breaking Up Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits Lawsuit Dropped; Claimed That Copyright-Filtering Violates Copyright Judge Sides With RIAA in âShamâ Litigation Class Action File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads LimeWire Crushed in RIAA Infringement Lawsuit Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/copyright-trolling-for-dollars/#ixzz0wMV4Oe14
These types of extortion practices should be outlawed. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that all they need is to sign up to a forum and start posting their own articles in order to generate a bogus lawsuit.