Bloggers beware! If you lift other’s content, it may cost you … up to $150,000
One Nevada attorney-turned-serial copyright litigant seems to have created a new legal niche — at the expense of bloggers and website owners nationwide.
Steve Gibson is an Illinois- and Nevada-licensed attorney living in Las Vegas, where he helms Gibson Lowry Burris LLP, a law firm that focuses on, among other things, copyright law. Around the beginning of the year, Gibson formed Righthaven, LLC, a company with the purpose of buying and registering copyrights of newspaper articles which have been lifted at least in part by bloggers and website operators, and then suing whoever he can find who has copied them.
Since the company’s formation, Righthaven has filed more than 80 copyright infringement lawsuits, sometimes several in a day, and all in the District Court for Nevada, against bloggers and website operators throughout the country.
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