Righthaven lost another copyright case, this time in Nevada. The “company” seems to be losing a lot lately, but this time, they have decided to refile the suit right after the case was dismissed.
A blogger named Dean Mostofi, was the defendant this time. He apparently used the full text of an article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal about a year ago. Long story short, the Judge found that Righthaven didn’t actually have the rights to the story at the time, so couldn’t sue over it now, despite an amendment to the contract between Righthaven and the Review Journal (hat tip to Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson).
The Judge said: “This amendment, however, cannot create standing because ‘[t]he existence of federal jurisdiction ordinarily depends on the facts as they exist when the complaint was filed.'”
Here’s the court document, courtesy of TechDirt:
So yeah, the case was dismissed. But Righthaven refiled it so that it existed during the time of the complaint this time. Oh boy.
It is also being reported that Righthaven was fined $5,000 for misleading the court.
Last month, a judge ruled that the copying of an entire Las Vegas Review Journal article was fair use when a war veteran had posted the article to a site aiming to generate discussion about it. Righthaven had another complaint dismissed a couple weeks before that when it sued Democratic Underground over an excerpt of a Las Vegas Review Journal article that a user posted on a forum.
