Thursday, March 10, 2011

Call The Wahmbulance!

The headline from the March 10, 2011 Las Vegas Sun tells the whole story right there:

Righthaven accuses defendant of running up legal fees in copyright case
What next?  Righthaven's entire business strategy was built around using absurd legal fees to terrify Mom and Pop bloggers into coughing up thousands of dollars out of fear that Righthaven's legal fees would bankrupt the defendants.  Now Righthaven is getting a taste of their own medicine, and not liking it.

If there is any justice in our courts (and I doubt that there is), Righthaven will be driven into bankruptcy and Steve Gibson will have to get a real job.

11 comments:

  1. That's a perfectly legitimate legal strategy. In America, EACH side pays its own legal fees. Righthaven has the CHOICE not to have its lawyers work as hard (of course, they risk losing if they do that). Only Righthaven is responsible for ordering its lawyers to expend billable hours. They can always confess judgement and stop the fees. ;-)

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  2. And this is why the left wins. When it comes to national and local politics they have giant brass balls, and are willing to use every trick in the book. Conservatives and libertarians generally suck at this sort of thing.

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  3. The left also has the advantage of having gobs of money to spend. Not so for conservatives and libertarians.

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  4. Maybe they can make up their lost "revenue" with the rights to the two porn movies they own. (See LV Sun 2-27). I'd imagine there is a lot more copyright violation with regard to porn on the Internet than in blogs.

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  5. So the EFF decided to protect the Democratic Underground instead of any number of other sites, including several dedicated to restoration of 2A rights. I've often thought of donating to the EFF but then they always seem to give me a reason not to do so.

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  6. You don't have an email address listed anymore, so I'm going to use the comments to pass something along.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/indian-workers-sue-american-company-feburary-22-2011-2#ixzz1FLRN2Lmh

    I wonder why any company saw a need to hire foreign workers for essentially unskilled labor.

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  7. Thanks for posting this..... Righthaven is the personification of skanky lawyers who milk the legal system for whatever ill-gotten gains they can siphon off into their slobbering jaws.

    They deserve a taste of their own medicine.

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  8. It's true about the money - the Left has far more large fincancial sugar daddies than the Right. But let's also not forget that the Left has a compliant and friendly Press ready to trumpet whatever the Left wants. Remember Ezra Klein's Journolist? I'll bet a month's salary that it still exists, just not as openly.

    Don't believe me? For evidence, simply look at the utterly different coverage the violent, hate-filled and at least partially Astro-turfed protesters in Wisconsin have received as opposed to the completely non-violent, true grassroots Tea Party folks.

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  9. Righthaven is not a left or right-wing organization, they're just a bunch of guys out to make a buck.

    The people who disagree most strongly with them tend to be vaguely liberal or libertarian, but mostly they're techies and are focused on tech issues. For example, Electronic Frontier Foundation, GNU Foundation.

    In mainstream politics there's large support for IP laws from both parties. If you polled politicians on whether the US needs strong copyright laws, I imagine 85% of Republicans would say yes vs. 80% of Democrats.

    All in all, this really isn't a left vs. right story.

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  10. The right has had its share of "sugar daddies", like Ford and Pew. The problem is that within a few years of their deaths, their foundations were co-opted by the left and now support causes that would have had their founders rolling in their graves.

    And Hillsdale College rolled in the dough because they had a conservative newsletter. Turns out it was almost the ONLY thing conservative there.

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