United States District Court of Nevada Follows Monty Python and the Holy Grail as Precedent
In Monty Python and The Holy Grail, the bridge troll who is the keeper of the Bridge of Death is cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril when he fails to answer his own riddle. Boing Boing’s co-editor, Cory Doctorow, reports that a similar fate has befallen Righthaven, LLC – and the issue is attorney’s fees. Hence, we get to post about it.
Righthaven LLC, a copyright holding company, has been described as a “copyright troll” that has entered into agreements concerning newspaper articles in order to enforce copyrights, based on a business model of suing bloggers, other Internet authors, and Internet site operators for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission.
Under the heading, “Copyright troll handed ass (again), tries saddest trick ever to get out of paying its victim’s legal bills,” Cory Doctorow gleefully reports:
“Everyone’s favorite copyright troll Righthaven has once again had its ass handed to it. The company, which was spun out of a Nevada newspaper, sublicenses the right to sue people from copyright holders, then sends legal threats to bloggers and website owners who publish articles or images from newspapers, including short quotations or thumbnails. Judges keep telling Righthaven that this isn’t legal — there’s no such thing as a sub-licensable right to sue — but Righthaven keeps on keeping on.
This time, they sued a user on a sports-book message board, who pasted two complete op-eds into a sub-sub board on the system. Not only did the judge rule that this was fair use (an eye-popping precedent in its own right), but it also ruled that, as usual, Righthaven didn’t have any business suing the poster because they didn’t own the copyright.
Here’s where it gets even sadder: Righthaven then argued that it shouldn’t have to pay the defendants’ attorney fees because it didn’t have standing to sue, so the court didn’t have standing to order it to pay. The judge laughed and laughed and laughed. And told them to cough up $34,045.50.”
We know that Cory is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws, and we hope that he will recognize that our liberal quotation from his online post is covered by Fair Use.
Hat Tip to Marc’s son Colin Alexander, an attorney at Wolfe and Wyman in Irvine, and a Boing Boing reader, for bringing Cory Doctorow’s post to our attention.