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Lawsuits

Righthaven initially entered agreements concerning old news articles from Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, based on a business model of suing bloggers, other Internet authors, and Internet site operators for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission. An affiliate of Stephens Media owned half of Righthaven. By March 24, 2011, 255 cases had been filed. Typically, Righthaven has demanded $75,000 and surrender of the domain name from each alleged infringer, but accepted out of court settlements of several thousand dollars per defendant. As of December 2010 approximately 70 cases had settled.

Righthaven LLC. v. Democratic Underground LLC, 791 F. Supp. 2d 968 (D. Nev. 2011), was a copyright infringement case which determined that a contract giving a party right to sue on behalf of a copyright holder does not give the party legal standing to file such lawsuits. This case is one of over 200 similar cases filed by Righthaven against media outlets using content from Stephens Media. Judge Roger L. Hunt ruled that Righthaven lacked standing to file a copyright infringement suit and ordered Righthaven to show cause within two weeks why it should not be sanctioned for failure to disclose Stephens Media as an interested party.