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Righthaven Karma
"Copyright troll" and "predatory practices" seem to be the right terms to use with respect to your completely unnecessary and bullying lawsuit, Nate. Luckily, someone is fighting back: Righthaven, the Las Vegas-based copyright troll, may have sued one website too many. The Electronic Frontier Foundation hit the company with a lawsuit Monday alleging Righthaven is abusing copyright law by suing for excerpting or posting newspaper articles without permission. Law firm Righthaven was formed earlier this year for the sole purpose of suing for copyright infringement. So far, its main client, Stephens Media, has publicly authorized it to sue the operators of 145 internet sites on behalf of its flagship paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/righthaven-sham/#ixzz111Y7RyIY
I've been following this pretty closely, I have to admit. There have been a few challengers their lawsuits, which I'm happy to see. It won't help my case, but hopefully it will give hope & defense to the others that have been nailed. Looks like they went after a few groups that had the financial backing that they couldn't bully into settling, and will hopefully be in for more fights as time goes on.
It's essentially like Disney suing the federal government (repeatedly) to have the copyright laws changed to protect their mouse. A company with the financial arm to put a chokehold on companies they know (probably) won't have the money to fight back. Hopefully, for the sake of this site and others, this becomes some sort of class-action deal, either way, it'll completely change the way the internet operates much in the fashion that Facebook and YouTube did years ago.