Back in early 2010 a company called Righthaven LLC was formed in the States and is described as a copyright holding company, which in itself does not sound too horrid … But it was its business practices that would get it heavily criticised.
You see, what it would do was trawl through the net looking for articles that had become popular and people had copied without asking permission. They would then approach the copyright owners and buy the articles off them.
Now they owned the copyright they would then go after the sites for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission, typically asking $75,000 and the surrender of the domain name.
This lead to their activity being described as ‘Copyright Trolling’ and the company as a ‘Lawsuit Factory’.
So where’s the giggle you ask ?
Under ICAAN ( Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ) domain owners are required to keep the WhoIs records up to date, something that Righthaven neglected to do. This resulted in the registrar ( GoDaddy in this case ) suspending their domain name. So now if you go to their website at http://righthaven.com/ you will see a nice little note from GoDaddy and not their blood sucking site …. As I say, sometimes you just have to giggle 