Copyright troll lawsuit blows up in face of Righthaven

I used to give money to EFF, and I support a lot of the same causes they do. But the last couple years or so their PR tactics have shifted noticeably into the sort of gross alarmism/hyperbole that does more harm than good to those causes. So I'll find other ways to support the things I care about.

What if the bully has the means to kill you and get away with it?

The key to what happened here is that the defendant was able to elicit the help of EFF and the Fenwick firm, undoubtedly pro bono, and this gave them first-class legal talent with which to pick apart the Righthaven claims. Unlike patent trolling suits, where the claimant is typically able to assert credible claims for millions of dollars, the Righthaven model relies primarily on bulk processing of settlements resulting from threats to file suit. Righthaven will scout out the web and find one-fer instances of "copyright violation," as when a contributor to a site posts an excerpt from a news article in a comments section. The damages associated with this, even in a worst case, run no more than into the tens of thousands of dollars and likely would be far less. However, Righthaven takes an assignment from the newspaper that owns the copyrighted content and threatens to file its bullying suit, i.e., it threatens to subject the defendant to an expensive federal copyright suit that will cost far more to defend than is worth it for a typical defendant. In that context, Righthaven's business model depends on the vast majority of defendants caving and being willing to settle for a comparatively small dollar amount in order to avoid the suit. Righthaven does this in volume and that is how it makes its revenue - by coercing a lot of smallish settlements and relying on bulk processing to justify the economics of its efforts.

This model rapidly falls apart in any case where a serious defense is mounted and particularly where the defendant (a) is represented by first-class lawyers (as it was here) and (b) forces Righthaven to spend far more on processing the case than it can ever hope to recover. Here, Righthaven got hit with all this, plus aggressive counterclaims, leaving it unable even to dismiss the case without getting permission from the court. Seeing it had a major loser on its hands, Righthaven brought just such a motion to get permission to dismiss and met with a response from the defendant saying that the court must condition any such permission to dismiss on Righthaven's paying all of the defendant's attorneys' fees. All in all, a pretty disastrous result for Righthaven.

I am not sure how much this may be replicable in other cases but it certainly underscores that the Righthaven model is vulnerable to attack and may spur others to mount similar efforts. It is in any case a good first step.

If this company is built upon this type of trolling, then yes it will greatly impact their revenue.

However, I agree with everything you've said about intellectual property trolling, in general. :)