Oh, what fun! Oh, what marvelous schadenfreude! Oh, where’s my popcorn bucket?
At least one court has finally lost all patience with copyright troll Righthaven. Ars Technica reports that, after a series of attempted appeals and delays, including missed deadlines for appellate filings and an attempted excuse that Righthaven’s lawyer has to undergo surgery, the court that issued a $34,000 judgment against Righthaven in August has finally authorized lawyer Marc Randazza to enlist the aid of the US Marshals to collect nearly $64,000 in costs and fees from the company through asset seizure.
I look forward to hearing all about how Randazza’s visit to Righthaven’s office goes. Will the company admit defeat and pay up? Or will it try to get away with further obstructionist antics? That’s the, ahem, $64,000 question.
And as a reminder, lest people wonder why I’m giving these proceedings so much attention, the Righthaven cases have the potential to be very important to the way we read and share news online. Righthaven attempted to extort money out of people for passing on news in ways that seemed natural to them—quoting excerpts or in some cases entire articles to pass on. Many newspapers allow readers to email entire stories to their friends or family, and it’s easy to see how someone could see reposting the entire story to their blog as just an extension of that kind of sharing.
And some of the judgments could amount to new legal precedents for fair use of digital media—for example, a couple of judges have ruled that it was fair use for defendants to repost entire articles to their blogs. That’s a pretty big change from the accepted state of affairs.
The cases also have the potential to send a pretty clear message to other companies that think they can build a business model on the backs of the courts by extorting settlements: “Don’t make judges angry. You won’t like us when we’re angry.”
