Righthaven's Lawyers Target of State Bar Investigation 49
New submitter nwf writes "Ars Technica reports that three of copyright troll Righthaven's company lawyers, including CEO Steve Gibson, are the subject of a Nevada State Bar investigation. Details of the inquiry aren't public, but judges have been blasting Righthaven's legal team so strongly in court that the move is hardly a surprise."
Re:Lawyers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't kid yourselves people. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. If you want legal advice, pay my retainer.
That's just plain nonsense.
Filing this stuff in a Nevada court was, shall we say, less than brilliant to start with. Neither our state or federal judges have much tolerance for trying to game the system with technicalities.
Righthaven's "bright" idea was to technically assign the copyright to righthaven, which would sue, while leaving the beneficial ownership with the original holder.
This violates so many basic principles that it's hard to list them all (lawyers owning an interest in the suit, a no lawyer firm practicing law, real parties in interest bring suit, . . )
This is how righthaven lost, as it should have. It was also predicable, as log as someone stuck it the litigation.
Now, if the papers had simply sued on their own behalf, some of the suits would have bee winnable. some, not all.
The one that came across m desk involved an editor at the paper givng oral permission to use the articles, as long as they he full attribution. Turns out that righthaven was searching for the links back to the articles to find the "infringing" articles.
Most of the uses out there probably were indeed infringing. However, it seems like the copyrights were only sent to righthaven after "violations" we're found, and only then registered with the copyright office' meaning that only actual damages were available up to the time of filing. With the articles remaining available from the papr for something like three bucks, this put a rather small cap on damages . . .
hawk, esq.
I'm surprised it took so long (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Regina we have a lawyer named Tony Merchant who's been under investigation by the local bar many times, and he's not been chastized by the judges and the courts nearly as often as Righthaven.
I was starting to think there was no oversight of it's members behaviour with Righthaven and a few ambulance-chasers making the news repeatedly but never being investigated.
The bar association in each district is more than qualified and bound to pull the "lawyer licenses" from it's members who abuse their priveleges and the court system overall.
Tony is still practicing, of course. There were issues that had to be resolved with his practice, and restitution made, but he learned his lesson and was allowed to continue practicing as a result. An investigation does not mean the Righthaven lawyers will be permanent disbarred, even if they are found "guilty" of something by the bar association in their state.