Just when I thought the Righthaven copyright troll cases couldn’t get any more interesting, the latest word out of the courts turned downright hilarious.
In its latest legal setback, a judge found a sports blog’s on-line reposting of two Las Vegas Review-Journal op-eds in their entirety to be fair use (echoing an earlier case in which an entire article reposting was also found to be fair use) and also found the company did not have any legal standing to bring the suit in the first place (since there is no assignable “right to sue,” its contract with the Review-Journal is not legally valid). The judge ordered Righthaven to pay the defendant’s $34,000 legal bill.
In a remarkable display of chutzpah, Righthaven then tried to argue that, if it had no standing to bring the suit, the court had no jurisdiction over the case at all and so could not assign legal fees. The judge was not impressed, and Righthaven will be required to issue a payment before September 14th.
How long will it be before Righthaven collapses in a cloud of legal-fee judgments? I don’t know, but judging from this latest shenanigan, I’m going to need a bigger tub of popcorn.
