The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a nice write up on the recent copy-right troll factory known as Righthaven. They’ve been going around suing everybody they can find who’s used any text from any story in a news article they own the copyright to. The main problem is Righthaven is doing several things different than other copyright holders. The two things I have the biggest issues with are the following:
Righthaven lawsuits are demanding that courts freeze and transfer the defendants’ domain names. Imagine if a single copyright infringement on Huffingtonpost.com or Redstate.com could result in forfeiture of the entire domain. Effectively asking for control of all of a website’s existing and future content — instead of only targeting the allegedly infringing material — is an overreaching remedy for a single copyright infringement not validated by copyright law or any legal precedent. This also indicates that the attorneys are willing to make overreaching claims in order to scare defendants into a fast settlement.
Righthaven goes straight for litigation. Righthaven isn’t sending cease and desist letters or DMCA takedown notices that would allow the targeted bloggers or website operators to remove or amend only the news articles owned by Righthaven. Instead, Righthaven starts with a full-fledged lawsuit in federal court with no warning. It’s sue first and ask questions later, which smacks of a strategy designed to churn up legal costs and intimidate defendants into paying up immediately, rather than a strategy aimed at remedying specific copyright infringements.
Yeah screw the whole idea of being nice and first requesting any infringing material be taken down. Going straight to a lawsuit is obviously the best idea out there. Seriously they are total douche bags.