Posted on 08/08/2011 5:35:53 AM PDT by rellimpank
Stephens Media LLC says its lawsuit partner Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas is addressing a "parasitic" business model in which newspaper content is regularly stolen by copyright infringers.
Defense attorneys charge, however, that Righthaven is merely running a money making scheme using dubious legal claims in no-warning lawsuits to coerce defendants into settling for a few thousand dollars.
In recent weeks, they’ve stepped up their attacks on Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson, a Las Vegas attorney, after he signed off on false court disclosures hiding the role of Stephens Media in lawsuits over Review-Journal material.
"Righthaven’s co-owners, Stephens Media (owner of member SI Content Monitor LLC) and Steven Gibson (owner of member Net Sortie Systems LLC and also Righthaven’s CEO), refuse to be stopped by anything, least of all copyright law and the rulings in this (court) district, in their rampage to obtain anything that even smells like money – often through settlements obtained after lawsuits are filed, but before defendants are served," said a filing last week by attorney J. Malcolm DeVoy IV of Randazza Legal Group.
(Excerpt) Read more at vegasinc.com ...
—ping—
Lets see - scour the internet looking for pictures that may belong to others. Then purchase the rights to them. Then sue the infringer. Nothing predatory there.
IMHO the new copyright holder’s options should be restricted to a cease and desist order, after all, the original owner had recourse to the same technology to find the infringement and did not pursue it.
I do not condone using other people’s work without permission or compensation (especially as an artist myself), but some of the examples of things they have pursued are hard to defend. This seems somewhat like a private, civil, ex post facto scheme than a legitimate enterprise that protects either the creators’ rights or the general respect for law it proports to engender.
When the Dept of Homeland Security is pursuing copyright infringement, why wouldn’t they think this environment is just fine for predatory practices?
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