How to make a few pennies from your copyrights…with bottom-feeding Righthaven

A Las Vegas “litigation trolling” company, Righthaven (the company has no web site), is betting that there is significant value in the copyrights owned by newspapers.  Righthaven searches for copyright infringement of newspaper articles, purchases the IPR to the story, then sues for infringement.  The Las Vegas Review-Journal is among the first to decide this is a clever revenue model–they sold articles to Righthaven that are the basis of suits against many of at least 86 website owners for copyright infringement (a list of the suits is provided here by one of the victims). The suits uniformly seek $75,000 in damages and forfeiture of the Web site domain names.

This is not the way to enforce copyright values–but our guess is that the media business is so desperate right now that others will jump at the chance to sign up. Copyright attorneys are looking at job creation here, and IP managers get a few pennies of the value of their intellectual property in this extremely shortsighted scheme.