As 2011 concluded, problems with unpaid bills continued to pile up for copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas.We may never get our money back, but we can cheer as the bastards go down.
Records Saturday showed Righthaven has been sued by its own process server and also faces a request by defense attorneys that it be found in contempt of court.
Righthaven is the copyright enforcement partner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and formerly of the Denver Post.
Righthaven is half owned by the family of billionaire Arkansas investment banker Warren Stephens, who owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal through his Stephens Media LLC company. Stephens made headlines this week when his majority-owned Halifax Media Holdings LLC agreed to buy 16 newspapers around the country from the New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
Co. for about $143 million.
While Stephens continues to invest in the newspaper industry, his family's half-owned Righthaven copyright protection company has been floundering.
After filing 275 no-warning lawsuits since March 2010 alleging online copyright infringements of material from the Review-Journal and the Post, which provided copyrights to Righthaven for lawsuit purposes, Righthaven has suffered a series of defeats in court.
Judges found Righthaven lacked standing to sue as the newspapers maintained control of the material at issue, or the defendants were protected by fair use, or both. These losses have prompted judges to order Righthaven to pay $216,355 in prevailing defendants' legal fees.
Righthaven can't -- or won't -- pay the fees. It's appealing the legal setbacks as well as the fee awards.
Righthaven's failure to pay the fees of prevailing defendant Wayne Hoehn led to Hoehn gaining a court order requiring Righthaven to turn its copyrights, trademark and website domain name over to a receiver so they could be auctioned.
Righthaven didn't turn these assets over to the receiver, but the receiver seized the righthaven.com domain name anyway and is auctioning it.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Johnston in Las Vegas, in the meantime, on Dec. 12 ordered Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson and his wife Raisha "Drizzle" Gibson to appear in court on Jan. 5 for a judgment debtor examination. Johnston also ordered that by Thursday -- a week before the examination -- Righthaven turn over to Hoehn's attorneys information about Righthaven assets that may be used to satisfy Hoehn's judgment and documentation about Righthaven's "purchases, transfers of funds or other dissipation of assets" in recent months.