A litigation firm that has waged a widespread and controversial copyright-enforcement campaign has lost a major battle in federal court in Denver, imperiling its future.
Since the beginning of the year, Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC has filed 57 cases in federal court in Colorado alleging copyright infringement. Those cases are part of a national campaign by Righthaven involving about 200 lawsuits alleging copyright thievery of newspaper content by websites and blogs.
But in a ruling this week, U.S. District Court Judge John Kane concluded that Righthaven didn’t sufficiently own the copyright in a Colorado case to sue over it. That conclusion led Kane to find against Righthaven in the case and will probably have a domino effect on the firm’s other Colorado cases.
The problem, Kane wrote in his finding, is the unusual way Righthaven obtained the copyrights it sued over. The firm worked with newspaper publishers — including Stephens Media and ap, the owner of The Denver Post — to obtain only the small strand of a work’s bigger copyright that gives it the right to sue over misuse of the work. (ap recently announced it has severed its relationship with Righthaven.)
The firm, for instance, didn’t own the ability to reprint the work at the time it filed suit. That wasn’t a big enough chunk of ownership to be able to sue over copyright theft because it creates a single-minded interest in the copyright, Kane wrote.
“A party with a bare right to sue may file numerous infringement actions of questionable merit with the intention of extorting settlement agreements from innocent users,” Kane wrote.
Righthaven’s critics, who accuse the firm of bullying, cheered Kane’s ruling.
“We don’t want to have a commodities market for lawsuits,” said Marc Randazza, an attorney who represented defendant Leland Wolf, a blogger, in the key Colorado case.
In an e-mail, Shawn Mangano, an attorney working for Righthaven, said the firm would fight on.
“Righthaven intends to continue to vigorously defend its right to maintain these, and other, copyright-enforcement actions,” Mangano wrote.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
