

Marshals ordered to seize Righthaven assets - mikecane
http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2011/nov/01/marshals-ordered-seize-righthaven-assets/

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CWuestefeld
This is interesting. Righthaven's strategy involved purchasing the right to
litigate copyright infringement from the copyright holders. If Righthaven gets
liquidated, what will become of that asset? Might it get so tied up in court
that nobody can figure out who owns the right to sue, and thus the copyrights
from those media outlets are effectively unenforceable?

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mindslight
Half of the original decision is that said "asset" _doesn't exist_. A
copyright is transferable. One can hire outside representation. However, one
cannot simply delegate the standing to sue (and thereby be insulated from
counter damages).

Hopefully the next step (when it's found that liquidating Righthaven won't
satisfy its debts) is to pierce the veil of this shell company and pursue
damages directly from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post for
their frivolous proxy lawsuit.

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CWuestefeld
You might be right, but I'm not so sure.

IANAL, but I don't believe that the court found that the asset doesn't exist.
I believe they found that the specific details of copyright law render it such
that the asset wasn't sufficient for Brighthaven to have legal standing.

That doesn't mean that the asset doesn't exist. It's just that BH was dumb
enough to buy something useless. It's kinda like me selling my car keys to
someone else. They're completely useless to the buyer (I didn't sell them my
car!), but the asset of the key certainly exists. And when the sheriff comes
to seize that buyer's assets, the key will be picked up with everything else
-- and who knows where it will go after that.

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lmkg
IANAL either, but my understanding is this: RH didn't actually purchase an
asset of any sort, what they paid for is a limited license to copyrighted
material. The distinction between owning an asset and licensing one results in
them actually not having anything, valueless or otherwise.

Getting a license is different than owning an asset because you don't own
anything, but rather someone gives you permission to make use of an asset that
they own (or have control over). The only right that the license covered, was
the right to sue people infringing on the copyright. The finding in court was
that you cannot license just this right and no others. Thus, RH never really
obtained this right.

So, in total, RH does in fact have nothing: they never had an asset of any
sort, and the right that they attempted to obtain by licensing was determined
not obtainable by licensing. The only thing they they attempted to obtain was
the legal permission to utilize that asset; having found that permission is
non-transferable, they have nothing at all.

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vsl2
The shame of it all is that the Righthaven lawyers will probably find a way to
avoid all personal financial liability (being protected by limited liability
of the LLC) and then set up shop again under a different LLC entity to do it
all over again.

The underlying problem is a system that doesn't punish this type of behavior
strongly enough. I'd endorse serious jail time (in ghetto "don't drop the soap
in the shower" type jails) for these types of offenses in order to
disincentivize this harmful parasitic behavior.

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SamReidHughes
Right, you should get prison-raped for filing a copyright suit. Amen, brother.

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vsl2
Right, because you shouldn't strongly disincentivize behavior that tries to
extort people by abusing the legal system and curtailing information freedom.
While we're at it, let's stop looking at anything that stinks of a pattern of
immoral business practices (that ruin thousands or millions of lives). Only
lock up the small-time thieves and fighters (the old-fashioned criminals).
Amen to you brother.

