Judge sets date for Righthaven to show why suits shouldn’t be tossed

Copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas today was given until Oct. 7 to show cause why its open lawsuits in Colorado should not be thrown out of court.

Senior U.S. District Judge John L. Kane in Denver issued the show cause order one day after finding Righthaven lacked standing to sue over Denver Post material in the one active case among 34 open there.

Technically, Kane today told Righthaven to show cause why summary judgment should not be entered against it in each case. The summary judgment language is significant because a summary judgment is a full resolution of each lawsuit on the merits.

That’s opposed to simple dismissals, which may give Righthaven a chance to amend its claims.

Attorneys said that given the language in Tuesday’s ruling in the Righthaven lawsuit against Leland Wolf, Righthaven likely has no chance to keep the Colorado lawsuits alive.

"With this ruling, the court has hopefully rung the death knell for the other remaining live cases in that district (joining the Nevada cases that have also been dismissed)," Julie Samuels, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), wrote in a blog post.

The San Francisco-based EFF fought Righthaven in the Wolf case as a friend of the court and was responsible for the first dismissals in Nevada over Righthaven’s lack of standing to sue over Las Vegas Review-Journal material.

Righthaven insists its 275 no-warning lawsuits filed since March 2010 are necessary to deter rampant online infringement of newspaper content and it plans to appeal Kane’s ruling in the Wolf case.

"As noted in the opinion, the decision involves an issue of first impression for the Tenth Circuit (the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals)," said Shawn Mangano, an outside attorney for Righthaven. "An appeal was inevitable regardless of which side prevailed at the district court level."

Samuels, in her blog post, highlighted portions of Kane’s ruling in which he commented on Righthaven’s business model — a model critics said involved mass lawsuits filed with the hopes of earning easy settlement money.

Righthaven in its suits typically sought $150,000 in statutory damages (damages where Righthaven didn’t need to show any economic harm).

Righthaven in its lawsuits also sought to seize defendants’ website domain names – a remedy thrown out of court in some of its Nevada lawsuits as being unauthorized by Congress.

Critics said this domain name seizure demand was merely a hammer Righthaven was using to pound defendants into submission.

Kane "recognized the enormous pressure the prospect of statutory damages (on top of the expense of litigation) can place on defendants, even those with meritorious defenses, and called out Righthaven’s business model for the settlement mill that it tried to be," Samuels’ post said.

Legal

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