Electronic Frontier Foundation bites back at copyright troll

In the US, online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation has started a lawsuit against the law firm Righthaven, which has been established for only one reason: suing copyright infringers. There are more firms that have seen this as a potential business area to exploit. This blog reported earlier on the US Copyright Group, for example.

Righthaven has found a niche in newspaper copyright infringement. Blogs or sites that copy content from newspapers without respecting their copyright, are liable to receive a threatening letter from Righthaven proposing a settlement of a few thousand dollars in order to prevent worse.

Around 20 percent of the lawsuits that Righthaven start end in a settlement.

Righthaven’s main client at the moment is Stephens Media, which has given the lawfirm the green light to take action against the operators of 145 websites that are alleged to copy content from Stephens Media’s Las Vegas Review-Journal.

EFF is taking on the defence of one of the recipients of Righthaven’s threatening proposals, a blog called Democratic Underground, a site that posts user generated satire.

Not only does EFF take care of the defense, it has also filed a counter suit, stating that Righthaven is nothing more than a “front and sham representative” of Stephens Media that only aims “to seek windfall recoveries of statutory damages and to exact nuisance settlements.”?

The EFF doesn’t seek damages, but is hoping that a positive result will aid others in taking on these kind of legal threats. “If we get the right decision from the court, it would establish good precedent that will be available to everybody,” says an EFF spokesperson to Wired.