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25-739: The Daily Democrat was owned by the Leake family from 1891 to 1984, when it was sold to the Donrey Media Group . Donrey ceded control of the paper to the California Newspapers Partnership in 1999. The paper was bought and is currently owned by Digital First Media . Much of the paper's local coverage is concentrated on Woodland and many unincorporated communities in Yolo County. It is widely available through much of Yolo County. This article about

50-572: A 50 percent cut of any lawsuit proceeds involving the Review-Journal. Successful defendants demanded court costs and legal fees, which Righthaven refused to pay. By December 2011, Righthaven was insolvent and on the auction block. Two lawyers have provided a framework for a legal defense against copyright trolls. Since most of the lawsuits about online copyright infringement rely on a minimal amount of information that targets non-infringers as well as infringers, there are ways to defend against

75-568: A California newspaper is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Stephens Media (newspapers) Stephens Media LLC was a Las Vegas , Nevada , United States, diversified media investment company. It owned stakes in the California Newspapers Partnership and the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette . The company had been expanding its interactive Internet business, operating online sites for its newspapers and portal sites like LasVegas.com, which

100-487: A Colorado court ruled in Righthaven v. Hill that: By the second half of 2011, defendants with resources to fight Righthaven in court were winning cases on grounds that their usage fell within the fair use doctrine and that Stephens Media had actually not assigned full ownership of the copyrighted material to Righthaven. Righthaven was also sanctioned by at least one judge for failing to disclose that Stephens Media got

125-560: A number of old news articles from Stephens Media , at the time the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal , based on a business model of suing bloggers and other Internet authors for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission. The matter was covered by the Los Angeles Times , Bloomberg News , Wired News , Mother Jones , The Wall Street Journal ,

150-637: A subsidiary of the Omaha World-Herald Company. In August, 2011, the Algona Upper Des Moines was sold to Hallmark Media. In February 2015, Stephens Media was purchased by GateHouse Media for $ 102.8 million. In December 2015, GateHouse sold the Las Vegas Review-Journal , the Stephens group's largest paper, to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson for $ 140 million. The company was called Donrey Media Group , which

175-410: Is a party (person or company) that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through strategic litigation , in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, sometimes without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through

200-490: Is distinguished from organizations such as ASCAP , which collect royalties and enforce copyrights of their members. One commentator describes Harry Wall, husband of nineteenth-century British comic singer Annie Wall, as the world's first copyright troll. Wall set up "the Authors', Composers' and Artists' Copyright Protection Office", to collect fees for unauthorized performances of works by composers (often deceased) based on

225-769: Is licensed to Greenspun Media Group . The company is also a partner in the California Newspapers Partnership with MediaNews and Gannett. The company also formed Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC in November 2009, a joint venture with WEHCO Media Inc. , in Arkansas. On November 28, 2010, Stephens Media Iowa, LLC, a subsidiary of Stephens Media, acquired several newspapers, including the Ames Tribune , Boone News-Republican , Dallas County News , Nevada Journal , Ames About People & Advertiser , Tri-County Times , and Algona Upper Des Moines from Midlands Newspapers Inc.,

250-655: The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Chattanooga Times Free Press , signed on with the firm. MediaNews Group has also used Righthaven to file a copyright infringement suit. The aggressive enforcement of the Stephens Media copyrights by Righthaven was being closely watched by other publishers, as is the debate it has generated. Critics of the relatively new practice have coined it ' copyright trolling ', and argue that

275-671: The Boston Herald , and other newspapers and news blogs, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation , which offered to assist the defendants. The paper's competitor, the Las Vegas Sun , covered all 107 of the lawsuits as of September 1, 2010, describing it as the first known instance of a copyright troll buying the rights to a news story based on finding that its copyright had been infringed. The Review-Journal 's publisher responded by defending

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300-478: The Las Vegas Review-Journal . The company was renamed Stephens Media Group in 2002. In June 2006, the company became known as Stephens Media LLC. The company has no connection with Stephens Media Group , a radio broadcasting company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2010, Stephens Media contracted with the litigation firm Righthaven LLC , giving it the power to enforce the company's copyrights when online violators go beyond

325-465: The U.S. Justice Department, and a new Arkansas limited liability company, Northwest Arkansas Newspaper LLC , was formed. Stephens Media sold its interest in the joint venture to WEHCO on May 5, 2016, which then assumed all control of operations of the newspapers in the joint venture. Newspapers in the joint venture include: Arkansas Iowa Nevada North Carolina Oklahoma Texas Tennessee Copyright troll A copyright troll

350-404: The alleged infringers. The term was also applied to two parties that separately sued Google in 2006, after posting content they knew would be indexed by Google 's Googlebot spider, with the industry standard " noindex " opt-out tags deliberately omitted. After Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google Inc. , adult magazine Perfect 10 was described as a copyright troll for setting up image links with

375-660: The best of their ability. Righthaven's lawsuits came under increasing judicial scrutiny, which led to Righthaven being found in June 2011 to lack standing to sue for alleged infringement of copyrighted material to which it holds only a limited license, as such a license does not confer the right to sue for infringement. Sanctions against Righthaven and its attorney, Steven A. Gibson, of Nevada law firm Dickinson Wright, are currently being contemplated by one judge. Righthaven later had its assets seized to pay judgments levied against it in lawsuits it filed against those whom it said infringed on

400-568: The bounds of fair use. More than 141 lawsuits have been filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas since mid-March. In a column published in the RJ shortly after the lawsuits began, publisher Sherman Frederick, said the primary goal with the partnership with Righthaven was to deter theft of the company's copyrighted materials. He said if the company was successful, he hoped Righthaven would find other media clients. In late August, WEHCO Media, which owns

425-563: The copyrights of clients. As a result, copyrights which had been "sold" by Stephens to Righthaven were "sold back" to Stephens for $ 80,000 to pay legal fees. In September 2009, Stephens Media and WEHCO Media Inc. , owner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette , announced plans to combine their newspaper operations in Northwest Arkansas and operate as a single company. The venture was approved in November 2009 by

450-461: The fashion industry over purported copyrights in fabric patterns. In 2021, the term was coined by a Belgian judge in reference to Permission Machine, which later changed its name to Visual Rights Group. This company scanned photos on the internet and sent large damage claims without asking for the removal of the material. In 2010, copyright holding company Righthaven LLC was called a copyright troll by commentators, after it purchased copyrights to

475-441: The inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works. Both the term and the concept of a copyright troll began to appear in the mid-2000s. It derives from the pejorative " patent trolls ", which are companies that enforce patent rights to earn money from companies that are selling products, without having products of their own for sale. It

500-458: The intent to sue Google for infringement after Google added them to its image search service. In Field v. Google , a Nevada lawyer took "affirmative steps" to get his legal writings included in Google's search results so that he could sue Google, and was ruled to have acted in bad faith. More recently, the term has been used to describe entities that bring questionable claims against companies in

525-540: The lawsuits, and criticizing the Sun for covering them. In August, 2010, the company entered an agreement with WEHCO Media in Arkansas to pursue similar actions, and announced that it was in negotiation with a number of other publishers. Wired magazine described the activity as "borrowing a page from the patent trolls", and noted that the company was demanding $ 75,000 from each infringer, and agreeing to settlements of several thousand dollars per defendant. In April 2011,

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550-517: The purpose of such enforcement is to make a profit. In the Poynter article, Stephens Media general counsel Mark Hinueber says the goal is to make sure the company's intellectual rights are protected. "We were seeing our entire work product in some stories just being right-clicked and cut and pasted into blogs, where people were selling Google ads around them and making money." The Las Vegas Sun has been thoroughly documenting Righthaven's activities and

575-526: The response. The Sun ’s outside law firm, Lewis and Roca, is defending several of the Righthaven suits. Targets of the Righthaven lawsuits included bloggers, political forums, major political parties, and several of the newspaper's own sources including NORML , DailyPaul .com, InfoWars , Free Republic , and others. On August 25, 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that they will make efforts to assist Righthaven LLC defendants to

600-625: The threat of litigation for statutory damages under the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1842 . In the 2000s, the SCO Group's effort to obtain royalties in regards to the open source operating system Linux was viewed as copyright trolling by some of the approximately 1,500 companies from whom SCO demanded licensing royalties, based on a copyright that a court eventually ruled belonged instead to Novell . Novell, by contrast, had no interest or intention of enforcing its copyright against

625-468: Was founded by Arkansas media mogul Donald W. Reynolds and based in Fort Smith, Arkansas . After Reynolds died in 1993 at the age of 86, the company was sold to the Stephens family of Arkansas, known for their Little Rock investment banking business Stephens Inc. Some of Donrey's properties were sold off, and the company moved its headquarters to Las Vegas , Nevada , home of its largest newspaper,

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