Righthaven reeling: secret doc could doom a copyright troll | Hacker News Reader

Righthaven reeling: secret doc could doom a copyright troll

arstechnica.com

89 pointsevo_913 comments

This revelation is devastating for Righthaven's current cases filed in conjunction with the Stephens Media relationship but does not (unfortunately) undermine the mass-lawsuit business model.

To be able to sue legitimately for copyright infringement, Righthaven must have had some substantial right under copyright assigned to it - that is, something beyond the bare right to sue (Silvers v. Sony Pictures).

Here, the agreement truly provides for a sham form of assignment: (1) Righthaven is expressly said to have no rights to exploit any of the copyrights purportedly assigned and all such rights are reserved to Stephens; (2) Stephens can block Righthaven from suing any particular party; (3) Stephens can demand the copyright back at any time; (4) Stephens gets a 50% cut of any recovery in any lawsuit filed; and (5) a Stephens-controlled representative is required to be part of Righthaven's key team. Given these terms and conditions, Righthaven is basically a puppet and Stephens is what the law calls the "real party in interest" in these lawsuits. Since no true assignment took place, the current lawsuits filed pursuant to this agreement are in deep trouble. And, just in case the Righthaven lawyers missed it, the judge who is responsible for handling these cases is hopping mad at them.

The bad news: if such assignments are done as true assignments, the Righthaven model still works, or at least is not undone be a congenital defect that can't be overcome in future cases.

Kudos to EFF for splendid work in pounding through the fake exterior of these cases and sending them to perdition, for that is surely where they will land after this revelation.

>The bad news: if such assignments are done as true assignments, the Righthaven model still works, or at least is not undone be a congenital defect that can't be overcome in future cases.

I'm not sure if any media creator would ever sign away their rights to that level, though.

If I understand this right(IANAL), for Righthaven to actually have a case, they would need some level of ownership of the work at hand. So they would need a right to distribute, perform, etc. the works that they're suing over.

I can't imagine any of the copyright holders would be willing to sign over those rights, considering that the entire reason that they would enter into an agreement with Righthaven would be to sue other people for "violating" them...

This was my initial reaction as well, but I think that the works in question have very little real value. They seem to mostly be news articles and photographs, both of which are presumably created in large quantities by the newspapers. My guess is that the newspapers didn't really sign on to prevent people from using their works, they just saw a way to monetize something they already own and took it.

> I'm not sure if any media creator would ever sign away their rights to that level, though.

Plenty of them do. A particularly historically-significant example was when Seattle Computer Products sold the rights to MS-DOS to Microsoft, but it's something that happens every day.

I think "to that level" means "to the point where you give up all interests in your work just so somebody else can sue." Selling your rights is one thing; simply assigning them away to a troll with nothing to show for it is somewhat less common.

>I'm not sure if any media creator would ever sign away their rights to that level, though.

Why not? The copyright holder doesn't have to sign over exclusive rights, they just have to give the organization the rights to license the work and collect royalties. This is precisely how copyright collectives like the RIAA and SoundExchange work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective

Your description and the one at Ars makes it sounds very cut-and-dried. What that makes me wonder is that the lawyers at Righthaven must have been aware of this flaw in their arrangement from the beginning, and they were just banking on the truth never getting out. Is that your take, or is it possible they weren't aware of this flaw?

Perhaps they're just not very good lawyers? We programmers wonder all the time how people can store passwords in the database as plain text. The answer is obvious: they're not very good at computer programming. It stands to reason that for every bad programmer there is also a bad lawyer, and they make mistakes.

I've seen bad lawyers in action, even though they were supposed to have been the best in their particular area of practice. The documents they filed contained spelling, grammatical, and factual errors; they were poorly (or not fully enough) researched; and in one case, the defense nearly made the prosecution's case for them.

Amazingly, the prosecution submitted to a plea agreement anyway. It took me a while to figure out why, but I think now it was purely because they were already overloaded with other cases and didn't feel like fighting it out.

Do you think they are or could be liable for any sanctions due to this sham lawsuit? And what sort of sanctions, if any, might be levied?

Personally, I think that divesting them of the copyrights in question could be an effective deterrent to future trolls, but I'm not sure that's even possible.

So why didn't Stephens Media just hire an attorney by hiring an attorney, rather than by creating a fake front?

Stephens Media is essentially sharecropping their IP. They get a cut of the profits if Righthaven's lawsuits succeed, whereas if the suits fail it's Righthaven that bears the legal costs.

Could this concept of assigning rights that don't exist apply to major media splitting hairs regarding distribution rights, e.g. allowing streaming to PCs, but not tablets, even though the data goes through the same wifi connection?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com