Righthaven, a litigation factory outfit targeting bloggers for publishing excerpts from Las Vegas Review-Journal, apparently does not have the legal standing to sue for infringement as they do not even own the copyright to the content they are suing bloggers over.
From Wired's Threat Level:
Copyright troll Righthaven told a federal judge Thursday that it has revised its contract with the Las Vegas Review-Journal to give it full copyright ownership over some of the newspapers’ content. It’s a bid to squelch a legal controversy over whether it has the right to sue bloggers who’ve quoted from the articles without permission.
Three decisions in the past week found that Righthaven, which has lodged more than 200 suits, never had standing to sue over content produced by Stephens Media publications, including the Review-Journal. In one ruling, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt dismissed Righthaven’s well-publicized case against the Democratic Underground blog, finding that Righthaven attempted to “manufacture” standing to sue. In that case, Democratic Underground was targeted for posting four paragraphs from a 34-paragraph story published by the paper.
Righthaven seems to have built a business model around suing bloggers in a bid to force them to settle. And for the most part, they have been successful. In light of this new development, however, the bloggers that had settled with Righthaven are now mulling legal action against the company.
Cross-posted to Jayel Aheram.
