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Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2010 | 9:08 a.m.
Steven Gibson
Sun archives
- R-J accused of entrapment over copyright enforcement (8-23-2010)
- Blogger asks to pay $200 to close R-J copyright suit (8-20-2010)
- 2 lawsuits over R-J copyrights lift total to 100 (8-19-2010)
- Website operators use new defenses to fight R-J copyright suits (8-18-2010)
- Righthaven reaches settlements in 2 cases over R-J copyrights (8-12-2010)
- Righthaven sues Democratic Underground website over R-J posting (8-11-2010)
- 5 more websites sued over R-J story copyrights (8-10-2010)
- Websites, bloggers make moves to avoid Righthaven lawsuits (8-9-2010)
- Righthaven continues suits over R-J copyrights; 91 total (8-6-2010)
- State Democratic Party fighting R-J copyright lawsuit (8-5-2010)
- Legal attack dog sicked on websites accused of violating R-J copyrights (8-4-2010)
- Some targets of Righthaven lawsuits fighting back (8-4-2010)
- Are website copyright violations hurting newspapers' bottom line? (8-4-2010)
- Defendants in R-J copyright lawsuits speak out (8-4-2010)
- Five more R-J copyright lawsuits filed (8-3-2010)
- R-J mob source hit with copyright suit (7-27-2010)
- More copyright lawsuits filed over Review-Journal stories (7-23-2010)
Detroit law firm Dickinson Wright PLLC has expanded to Las Vegas by combining with Las Vegas firm Gibson Lowry Burris LLP.
"The addition of a Las Vegas office not only expands our firm’s national footprint, specifically in the western portion of the country, but it adds depth, experience and additional clients to our successful, growing intellectual property and gaming practice areas, which is consistent with the firm’s strategic growth plans," Dickinson Wright Chief Executive William Burgess said in a statement Monday.
Gibson Lowry Burris LLP attorneys joining Dickinson Wright are Steven Gibson, Jodi Donetta Lowry and J. Scott Burris, the statement said.
Gibson will be the managing partner of Dickinson Wright's Las Vegas office.
Dickinson Wright says it has more than 260 attorneys practicing in more than 40 specialty areas. Besides the Las Vegas office, it has offices in Michigan, Nashville, Phoenix, Toronto and Washington, D.C.
Gibson is also the CEO of Righthaven LLC, a Las Vegas firm that attracted national attention this year when it filed copyright infringement lawsuits against 100 website operators and bloggers who had allegedly displayed material from the Las Vegas Review-Journal without authorization.
The lawsuits, generally filed without warning, were a departure from the usual practice in the newspaper industry of asking or demanding that infringing material be removed and replaced with links before resorting to litigation.
Gibson and Righthaven say the lawsuits are necessary to deter copyright infringement, protect newspaper industry revenue and generate revenue for Righthaven.
But some defense attorneys call Righthaven's initiative a legal shakedown aimed at coercing settlements from generally mom and pop-type websites and "barratry," or the persistent incitement of litigation -- charges denied by Righthaven.
Righthaven's initiative has been covered by the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, wired.com, law.com, the American Bar Association's ABA Journal, the Reason Foundation's reason.org, the Boston Herald, the Concord Monitor and by numerous media and legal blogs.
Joff Wild of Intellectual Asset Management magazine commented July 25 on the Righthaven business plan: "Find as many alleged infringers of your rights as possible, issue a writ (lawsuit) and then demand a settlement fee to make it go away. The settlement fee will often seem more attractive than having to fork out money to defend an action -- even if you think it may have no real basis in law. And if you have no knowledge of legal concepts such as fair use, and you know that you have posted copyright material without permission, then you may well bite off the hand of someone offering you a settlement rather than a court case."
"... what this will also do, though, is to make IP (intellectual property law) an even dirtier concept for many people. Free access to information is considered something of a right online. Legal moves that are seen as seeking to deny this will always raise hackles," Wild added.
Steven Gibson and his law firm are the poster child of whats wrong with our legal system.
The Review Journal and their news paper are the poster child of whats wrong with news papers. I never read that terrible excuse for reporting any more. I dont even go to their website because I am not going to give them any clicks.
A big ditto to westvegas' comment.
I guess Mr Wild is giving an implied license for everybody to copy and paste all his articles especially ones for the Intellectual Asset Management magazine.
Thanks!!!!
Don't you want to bitch slap this guy?
Did Dickinson Wright even consider Gibson's background with Righthaven before making him the managing partner....lol. Did they even know about Righthaven? Good luck with your new Vegas venture fellas.
westvegas: Actually, I thought Elizabeth Halverson was "everything that's wrong with the legal system," but you may be right.
Chunky says:
The new face of greed. Instead of ambulance chasers we now have Blogger chasers!
Pick on someone your own size if you want to abuse the legal system.
That's what Chunky thinks!
This guy just stinks of scam artist. He obviously got bullied and taken advantage of when he was younger and now that he has money (from his rich parents) he thinks the hookers and blow make him a god.
More on this idiot: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07...
Looks like he has napoleon syndrome to me.
This picture of Gibson just confirms how much of a tool he actually is. Ridiculous.
"Gibson and Righthaven say the lawsuits are necessary to deter copyright infringement, protect newspaper industry revenue and generate revenue for Righthaven."
I don't think, as I've said a number of times, that these suits were "necessary" to deter infringement, and so forth.
Almost any attorney you ask, well, any smart attorney will probably tell you a lawsuit is the last weapon you have. And, there's that old saying "You have an 80 percent chance of winning the best suit; and an 80 percent chance of losing the worst," or something like that.
Nothing's assured in this matter, save those who will settle. But there are a few who plan to fight it with great vigor and it's going to be interesting to see if "barratry" will hold in this matter.
What's interesting to me is that a number of defendants plan to fight this to the hilt, as they say. Now, everyone of those defendants broke the law, so what is the court going to do. And, if these are jury trials, I've got to believe there are going to be some on those juries who say, "That could have been me...it was a mistake, let him or her go, no fine."
In this economy, in this state, which some say has the worst economy in the nation, one would think there's a little bit of slack in these things. And I still want to know why Righthaven's dropping the Curtis suit. It has a perfect right to do so and according to an attorney I know, it's not discriminatory.
WestVegas: There's a lot "wrong" with our legal system, but I know a lot of very fine attorneys here in town and elsewhere. They're ethical, fine people. Don't tar them all with the same brush. This town has some great law firms, many of which do a lot of pro bono work and most of whom are equally confused why this final trigger was pulled.
I've been around for a long time and dealt with may attorneys. Most, in my experience are good guys (and I use that term in a unisex fashion).
It's bad enough we live in a state where regulators screw up to a point where we have regulators who let things like Endoscopy Clinic (Desai) and USA Capital slip through their fingers and are ranked 48th or so in education, but to have this "nonsense" in Sherm's terms, come up.
Shakespeare said it best: "First, we kill the lawyers."
"I don't think" ...those words do sum up your argument.
Obviously the Righthaven lawsuits are sending a message.
That message is don't copy and paste LVRJ copyright material.
That message is flowing to websites operators who are for the first time realizing that they should apply common sense ethics and not steal copyright material.
The lawsuits most likely are preventing copyright infringement in the first place.
Sarge: Wouldn't a non legal message, a letter, do the same trick? Is it the RJ's place to "punish" wrongdoers, or inform the public
And Sarge/Sherm: Why don't you tell everyone why you had to take a grammar course when you were a reporter at the RJ?
Oh Great
Now we get to see how many ambulance chasers law firms there are in this country. These guys are a disgrace to all lawyers, and the new paper industry should be hanging their heads in shame, for not reporting on this problem.
If they continue with what they are doing, they are going to kill the news paper industry!
No one needs news papers any more; they get their news off the internet, their phones and the television!
I stopped buying the news paper after reading this! They want you to Email the story to friends and also provide a link to the stories! Then they want to sue you, sounds like entrapment to me!
This is not the way to keep a new paper running, what kind of business plan do they have in place? The bloggers and the people who post a story on the internet, are adding to their readership. Once the news papers hit the front doors of anybody that reads them, is the beginning of their death. They have a life expectancy of 10 hours, and then it's into the trash never to be read again! The bloggers or anybody that post the stories some where bring them back to life, and sends readers to the news papers sites!
What the hell is so hard to understand, I thought the owners of news papers were suppose to be intelligent, you sure can't prove it by me any more!
Read my lip! "Here lies the RJ news paper may it rest in peace"
"Obviously the Righthaven lawsuits are sending a message.
"That message is don't copy and paste LVRJ copyright material."
A letter to the people who inadvertently exceeded fair use would have sent the message as well.
But it would not have sent the message that the Review-Journal is run by greedy and evil people, who don't mind bankrupting people who make an innocent mistake. (And in at least one case--they served someone with no connection to the website that apparently infringed. They sued someone who put up a Facebook fan page about the website.)
It would not have sent the message that the Review-Journal and the rest of the Stephens Group publications should not ever be linked to--ever. Good job Shermy/SgtRock.
"The lawsuits most likely are preventing copyright infringement in the first place."
It's hard to infringe the copyright of something that no one ever reads, isn't it?
fairuser: I agree with you. The New York Times is online and you can get local AP news locally...and there's alway this Pulitzer winnng newspaper. Why bother with that which lines birdcages before it's read.
"Now we get to see how many ambulance chasers law firms there are in this country."
Obviously, Shermy is actually a closet Democrat--supporting the filing of unnecessary lawsuits just so lawyers (on both sides) can get rich, and clogging the federal courts. I always got the impression that the Review-Journal was sort of a right-wing newspaper. I guess not.
"A letter to the people who inadvertently exceeded fair use would have sent the message as well."
That cost money.
One would have to hire staff and purchase software to police the Internet and then send a letter to people who are stealing their property to nicely ask to stop.
That is how you would run a business?
That is like a 7/11 gas store hiring staff to track people who shoplifted and then call the shoplifters and kindly ask the shoplifters to return the property and beg them to stop shoplifting.
These people who are copying and pasting have zero ethics.
G** only knows I try not to be offensive or insulting, but Sarge, "grubstaking" Righthaven cost more than sending out letters. And why would you even think of buying software, etc. Please, your thought process, logic and intelligence just makes no sense...well, it does, because you are Sherm.
This entire discussion with you is so far off base. Either you're just the least sympathetic individual in the universe or the the greediest.
And, I honestly believe that the RJ is going to suffer for these actions. Unfortunately, its editorial staff probably doesn't have the guts to stand up to you and say, "Hey, we're going to lose sources because of this." And, Sherm, you will.
The Pulitizer winning Las Vegas Sun is going to find itself inundated with stories that might have gone to the RJ. I don't want to see any newspaper fail. What I'd to see is Stephens Media act like a real business and fire its senior management for incredibly bad judgement.
Don Reynolds is rolling over in his grave.
You are pretty slow.
" Righthaven cost more than sending out letters"
It does not cost anything to LVRJ. Do you get it now? Do I need to draw pictures. How much about I do a step-by-step movie for you.
But you want LVRJ to spend money to hire staff to police the Internet and then send letters who are stealing their stuff to ask them nicely to stop.
I do it very very very very slowly for you.
Using Righthaven, LVRJ spends $0 dollars. As in 0 cents, 0 nickels, 0 dimes, 0 quarters...ziche...nada...blanko.
But you want them to spend $10,000's of dollars to hire staff, purchase software for them to look for thieves who are stealing their intellectual property and then send the thieves nice letters asking them to stop.
I do it again for you.
Righthaven COST LVRJ.......$0 zero....ZERO DOLLARS.
You want LVRJ to spend $10,000's of dollars to monitor and then send out letters.
May 28, 2010: "We grubstaked and contracted with a company called Righthaven." Did Sherm give Righthaven grubs to "grubstake" the company." Let's see, $0.44 times 100 for postage and say, a buck more for the overhead, even for 1000 violators, well, Sarge, you do the math.
It's pointless now Sherm to argue with you as you have no responsible or reasonable answers. If you took your two bit polling outfit and had it poll bloggers and readers on the effect of the transmittal of a cease and desist letter, my guess is that almost all, if not all would respond that they would take posts down and follow the rules that they had just learned.
You're an angry old man who never did and never will understand the responsibility of a newspaper to the public. Fortunately we have alternatives to the RJ.
Obviously, you have never ran a business.
Who do you think will prints out the letter, stuffs it in the envelope?
How you think someone would even find the theives on the Internet?
Would they use software? Would they spend time doing that?
Are you going to volunteer and do all that work for free for LVRJ?
Or do you think little fairies come out the sky and do the labor?
Again, you are totally clueless about what it takes to run a business.
You must believe you need zero labor to get anything done and it just poof....happens all by it self.
Again, you should put your money where your mouth is.
Offer to pay for all the work that Righhaven is doing......the cost of software.....the labor to run and manage the software...the labor to do the footwork to find the website owners and addresses...the footwork to type upthe cease and desist letter...the labor to stuff the letter in the enevlope....the labor to follow-up to see if the thief has stopped stealing the copyright.....
Please....offer to pay for all that labor and software cost and material.
The LVRJ probably will take you up and that.
Be a good boy....put your money where your mouth is.
Murray: I'm completely with you on 99% of this. Gibson is freakin scum, and RH epitomizes all that is wrong with our exceedingly litigious society -- there's really no denying any of that.
I've silently witnessed (and enjoyed) almost all of these running battles (aka Sarge v. compassion/reason), but I have one legitimate question that, as far as I know, hasn't been brought up yet:
**If Righthaven is forced send take-down letters to infringers prior to filing suit, what is the incentive for these websites to NOT post an infringement or to closely monitor/remove any infringements located on his or her website? In other words, if you know you're going to get a verbal warning before the the hammer is dropped (in the form of a federal lawsuit), why would you really care about committing the act in the first place, or care about getting caught for committing the act?**
That's my two cents. It's really my best effort to play devil's AKA Gibson's advocate. Other than that, I'm with the rest of you guys. There's undoubtedly merit behind the RH's premise, but this is taking it way too far.
Forgive me, I'm a little slow sometimes, but does anyone know what the split is on these lawsuits? If it isn't costing the R-J anything, what % of the money does Righthaven give them?
What I am confused about is the suing of websites that had the content posted by a 3rd party (forums for example). A take down notice would be appropriate here. The spirit of the DMCA law would dictate that even though they may not be registered with the copyright office.
Sherm likes to refer to this to someone stealing his car. But the fact is that he is suing the parking garage at the mall where the car was dumped. Why not sue the thief? I bet if you just notified the parking garage they would be more than happy to help you find the thief and give you your car back.
"The spirit of the DMCA law would dictate that even though they may not be registered with the copyright office."
There is a spirit of DMCA that a person hosting a site do two things.
One is have verbiage on their site warning and guiding people not to do copyright infringement. If it is a small site then they should be policing the postings.
Second the spirit and letter of DMCA says a website operation must have a means for one to easily send take down notices hence the registering with the US copyright office.
If the site does not clearly list its ownership information and contact information then that is also is violating the spirit of DMCA.
DMCA requires website operations to register with the US Copyright office and that requires one to pay a fee.
If you own a website then you are respondible for everything on that website including what casual users post on the site. If you follow DMCA rules and regulations then you will force Righthaven to send you take down notices for the instances of where a non-staff casual users post copyright material.
Lastly, most of the lawsuits deal with the owner of the website or a staff person performing copyright infringement. There is no excuse for that.
SweetScience: My point was/is that because of the "wild west" of the Internet, my guess is most of the defendants just believed if you post a complete article with full attribution, it was alright, not in violation. I'm not contending that when the defendants did didn't violate copyright laws, just that with regard to Internet posts, they were ignorant of it. Now many know, but many more probably don't, just because they haven't seen this matter in the media.
Well said Murray. What a mess.
They found the contact info easily enough to serve papers, they could easily have used that info to send a letter.
Sweet Science: Thank you.
Craignv: Good point. I might add to that that I think "service" costs at least $20 for each. I don't think it costs that much to send out a form letter, but I could be wrong, given the way the RJ is run.
Murrayburns, which Facebook fan page are you referring to?
Stop the Righthaven Witchhunt: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=lf#!...
My God, the EFF has finally responded!
EFF Seeks to Help Righthaven Defendants:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/eff...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to assist defendants in the Righthaven copyright troll lawsuits. Righthaven, founded in March of 2010, files hundreds of copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of newspaper publishers against bloggers who make use of news content without permission. To that end, Righthaven searches the internet for stories and parts of stories from the newspapers that they represent.
SweetScience:"**If Righthaven is forced send take-down letters to infringers prior to filing suit, what is the incentive for these websites to NOT post an infringement or to closely monitor/remove any infringements located on his or her website? In other words, if you know you're going to get a verbal warning before the the hammer is dropped (in the form of a federal lawsuit), why would you really care about committing the act in the first place, or care about getting caught for committing the act?**"
I think the answer to this is that most people didn't know what they were doing violated copyright laws just because it's done so frequently on the Internet and has been for years. If I had blog and got a "take down" letter from a newspaper pointing out that what I was doing was illegal, I'd surely comply.
As to Sarge's comments about the costs of letters versus immediately suing, well, they're just over the top. Almost any attorney will tell you that filing suit is the "last arrow in the legal quiver" for most things, because of the old 80-20 saw.
Sure the RJ has copyright notices all over the place, but how many, because of what's gone on before, realize that it's against the law to repost. My guess is that most people figure, well, I can read it for free so I can repost it. It doesn't mean those people are stupid, just uninformed.
And, back to Sarge's discussion of costs, I've been told that "all in," as they say here in Vegas, it's a lot less than sawbuck a letter. I don't know if that's a good number or not, but it came from a "reliable source."
Plus, in reading some answers to these suits, which are posted on the Internet (can't remember the site though), it seems that some of the responses might be pretty reasonable in court. But who knows?
Sarge, are you a lawyer?