Righthaven was a Nevada company created in 2010 for a limited purpose: to purchase copyrights in newspaper articles, sue bloggers and website operators that quoted or linked to those articles, and intimidate them into settling the lawsuits. Between March 2010 and June 2011 Righthaven filed 275 lawsuits in federal courts in Nevada, Colorado and South Carolina.
A recent article, which provides an interesting retrospective of the Righthaven debacle, offered an example of the type of lawsuit the company pursued:
It sued a woman in Boston who had a nonprofit blog about cats, presented from a feline point of view. She had posted a Review-Journal story about a fire killing some birds, and said she credited the Review-Journal and linked to the paper’s website. A Los Angeles Times writer commented that even the Review-Journal’s attorney “seemed to have a sense that his paper effectively had blasted a small tabby with a howitzer.”' The woman settled before Righthaven was hit with some fair-use defeats – her case likely would have been a fair-use candidate had she been represented by an attorney.
Righthaven dissolved in 2013, after a series of devastating defeats, including various dismissals, sanctions, and at least one bench slap by a federal judge who described Righthaven's claims as "flagrantly false -- to the point that the claim is disingenuous, if not outright deceitful."
Disciplinary complaints were filed against three of the attorneys associated with Righthaven, including the company's founder, Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson. Since the grievances are not public, we don't know precisely what charges were filed against these lawyers. But, given the judge's comments, we can imagine they included filing frivolous claims and various forms of deception. According to the article, no disciplinary action has been taken against any of the Righthaven lawyers. As one blogger noted: "not even a single public reprimand. Wow. Exactly what does it take to violate Nevada’s ethics rules?"
The Nevada State Bar recently issued a statement confirming that all of the Righthaven complaints were dismissed in November 2014 and offering this explanation:
Regarding the discrepancy between judge and panel decisions, apparently the two entities evaluated the information differently, and disciplinary matters have a higher standard of proof than almost all civil matters in a judicial setting.
The comment about the differing standards of proof is interesting. I doubt most members of the public realize that the standard for proving deception in an attorney disciplinary proceeding is higher than in a federal court. I understand that many jurisdictions apply the "clear and convincing evidence" standard to attorney discipline cases (by contrast, in New York, we apply "fair preponderance of the evidence.") Does the higher standard adequately protect the public against attorney misconduct? I am interested in hearing other views on this issue.