Righthaven Wants More than Domains Now

Righthaven, the company that turned copyright lawsuits into a business model, had a claim dismissed by a federal court in Nevada last week. The judge said that the company’s practice of requesting domain names from publications it deems infringers “fails as a matter of law and is dismissed”.

That’s according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to “defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights.”

According to the EFF, Righthaven has filed another case demanding not only a domain, but all hardware, software, and electronic media used to store, disseminate, and display the works in question.

“Not only has the domain name claim been specifically and completely rejected by that very court, but Righthaven’s new citations do nothing to help its claim,” says EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “As an initial matter, Section 505 does not have a subsection (b), and concerns attorneys’ fees, not the surrender of domains and hardware. While Righthaven probably meant to cite to some other section and was simply sloppy in the drafting, no section of the Copyright Act will help them. Indeed, Righthaven has already “concede[d] that such relief is not authorized under the Copyright Act.”

“Nor is the citation to Rule 64 going to help Righthaven,” he adds. “This is the same argument it raised in Righthaven v. DiBiase, and which the court flatly rejected. Indeed, the argument was silly to begin with, since Rule 64 concerns state law remedies and copyright is a federal law.”

Last time we covered Righthaven’s doings they had filed a suit against a contributor for Ars Technica, who had written a story about Righthaven and included an image of an image from a court document. The suit was quickly withdrawn by Righthaven in an embarrassing sequence of events.