The copyright troll is born
This is an interesting development that is already getting quite a bit of coverage in the US. Righthaven, a company based in Las Vegas, has been buying copyright material from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. And since March, it has initiated legal proceedings against 80 websites and bloggers, and is also said to have settled cases with a number of others. The target of Righthaven’s actions have been sites which reproduce the Review-Journal’s material without permission. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues,” says Righthaven’s founder Steve Gibson. Stephens Media, the owners of the Review-Journal like what Gibson is doing so much, they are said to have authorised him to expand operations to all 70 of its titles. “We perceive there to be millions, if not billions, of infringements out there,” Gibson states.
According to TechDirt (not the most disinterested of sources I grant) , the company’s modus operandi is to issue a writ without sending any warning first or requesting a DCMA takedown; it then “quickly demands a settlement fee”. TechDirt also claims that at least some of the organisations and individuals targeted have actually been rerunning stories printed in the Review-Journal in which they appear, and are also providing links back to the newspaper’s website.
As a business model this all sounds quite familiar, doesn’t it? Find as many alleged infringers of your rights as possible, issue a writ and then demand a settlement fee to make it go away. The settlement fee will often seem more attractive than having to fork out money to defend an action – even if you think it may have no real basis in law. And if you have no knowledge of legal concepts such as fair use, and you know that you have posted copyright material without permission, then you may well bite off the hand of someone offering you a settlement rather than a court case.
Putting aside the rights and wrongs of what RightHaven is reported to be doing, what will be interesting here is to see whether other copyright owners turn to third parties to enforce their rights. What we don’t know, as far as I can tell, is how much Gibson has paid Stephens Media for the right to enforce – is it an upfront sum, a share of the proceeds or a mixture of the two? But if they are making decent money from it, you can imagine others wanting to get a share of the action too.
The other thing is that unlike the NPE model, this may well be quite simply exported to other parts of the world. There will never be any issues with quality and validity – a copyright is a copyright is a copyright, after all – while tracking down potential targets and sending them a writ is not exactly expensive. The only argument is whether the alleged infringement is covered by the fair use/fair dealing concept; and, in fact, in many countries such provisions are actually much stricter than they are in the US. But that does not even come into it if your writ and offer of a settlement gambit pays off, which it could well do quite a lot of the time.
If the model works well, all you are doing is playing a numbers games: there are plenty more potential online infringers of written copyright material than there are patent infringers, you don’t need to do any reverse engineering and the money you need from settlements in order to turn a profit is nowhere near as much.
Of course, what this will also do, though, is to make IP an even dirtier concept for many people. Free access to information is considered something of a right online. Legal moves that are seen as seeking to deny this will always raise hackles. I can already see the world’s various Pirate Parties writing angry press releases and demanding action.
Source: http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=66f3eeeb-f8f8-4f28-b7eb-06ddba1d3aa6
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