'Attack Dog' buys infringed copyrights, then sues

This little piece in yesterday's ABA Journal, "‘Attack Dog’ Group Buys Newspaper Copyrights, Sues 86 Websites", looks like good news for copyright litigation lawyers. In brief,

"... A Las Vegas start-up called Righthaven has purchased several copyrights to the Las Vegas Review-Journal and sued at least 86 website owners for copyright infringement, the Las Vegas Sun reports. The suits seek $75,000 in damages and forfeiture of the website domain names.

Right: why bother to bark and bite if you can get a copyright troll to do it for you?

“When it comes to fighting copyright theft in the news industry—the piracy of stories, editorials, columns, photos and videos—there are watchdogs and there are attack dogs,” the Sun says. “The Las Vegas Review-Journal and its copyright enforcement partner, a Las Vegas star-tup called Righthaven LLC, are squarely in the attack-dog category.”

The story says Righthaven first trolls to find an infringement and then buys the copyright to the story. The next step is an infringement suit. Defendants include “mom-and-pop-type bloggers” such as the City Felines Blog and even the Democratic Party of Nevada ...

Some defendants have argued Righthaven lacks standing because it didn’t own the copyrights at the time the infringing story was posted. Other defendants who posted stories about themselves may have a fair-use defense, San Francisco lawyer Chris Ridder told the Sun.

A separate Las Vegas Sun article details other defense arguments. Some defense lawyers have claimed that Nevada courts don’t have jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants, or that Righthaven should have requested the offending material be taken down before filing suit.

Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson told Wired's Threat Level blog that his company has an agreement with the Review-Journal publisher to begin helping it enforce copyrights for more than 70 other newspapers in nine states. “We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson tells the blog. “Media companies’ 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."

The IP Finance weblog hopes to keep an eye on this development, and is particularly interested to see whether it will be a business model that will spread to Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

Thanks, Chris Torrero, for this link.

Who owns Unix? SCO rises like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Appeal Court

Theres a fascinating report over at ComputerWorld which re-opens the argument about who owns the copyright to the Unix code. The whole case is many moons old - and seemed to have been settled by a 2007 decision that the copyright in the code was owned by Novell. The 10th circuit court of Appeals has now concluded that in fact SCO owns the code.

What struck me most in the report is that the case is clearly being funded by a private equity company, Stephen Norris Capital Partners, who have invested in the company according to the ComputerWorld story. SCO - according to the same report - is obliged to aggressively continue its litigation against Novell, IBM and Autozone.

Somewhat confusingly - but maybe somebody can provide some answers here - SCO is still in bankruptcy, according to the SEC filing on 3 August 2009. It seems that the investiment in the company by Stephen Norris Capital Partners may have only paid for the on-going trial. The remainder is at a high interest rate - which SCO could presumable now draw on to move the cases against IBM, Novel and Autozone ahead. Fascinating - do we now have a copyright troll on the loose?