Paid Content notes that Righthaven, the copyright troll suing organizations and individuals who re-blog excerpts from articles from a Las Vegas newspaper, has offered to drop its lawsuit against the Democratic Underground website provided it does not have to pay their legal fees. Under American law, copyright cases have a lower bar than most others to allowing victorious defendants to recoup legal fees.

As part of the settlement, Righthaven promises it will not file any more lawsuits against those who copy less than 75% of the given article. The Democratic Underground suit involves a five-sentence excerpt from an article more than 50 sentences long. Righthaven has already flatly lost a suit against a real-estate broker who copied only eight sentences from a 30-sentence article; the judge said it was “fair use” (PDF).

Seems like Righthaven is starting to fear that its litigation strategy might prove costly rather than profitable. Even when it wins or forces a settlement, the awards tend to be less than $5,000—and even one or two costly losses could eat that profit margin up and then some.

I suspect I’m not alone in hoping that Democratic Underground flatly turns down this settlement offer. It’s ridiculous that Righthaven should get to run up costly legal bills for its victims with these frivolous copyright lawsuits and then back down and stick them with the charges. Righthaven made its bed—let the company lie in it.

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