• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 7, 2010

The copyright litigation outfit Righthaven this week filed three additional lawsuits alleging infringement of pieces from the Stephens Media chain, bringing to 11 the number of actions brought since March. The most recent cases are against the principal of a Texas personal injury law firm, the college sports site KillerFrogs.com, and the nonprofit advocacy group Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

As in the previous eight lawsuits, Righthaven appears to have filed complaints in court without first asking that the pieces be removed. All of the lawsuits allege that either entire articles or portions of pieces from papers owned by Stephens, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, were unlawfully posted on sites run by the defendants.

Launce Rake, communications director for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, says no one contacted the organization or its Web administrator before filing suit. Rake also says that the site links back to the original source, and for at least the last year, has only excerpted brief portions of news articles.

"Our whole goal was to send traffic back to the Web sites for the newspaper outlets that produced this content," says Rake, a 20-year veteran journalist.

Dr. Shezad Malik, a lawyer and medical doctor who also was sued for allegedly infringing copyright by posting at least portions of articles on his blog, says he only learned of the lawsuit from Online Media Daily.

"I looked at the news stories as the type of thing that might be interesting to the people who might read my blog," he said, adding that he always linked back to the originals. "I don't intend to pass this work off as my own."

Meanwhile, one of the first groups sued, NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), filed papers seeking dismissal. NORML said it didn't copy or display any of the articles itself.

Instead, NORML says it subscribed to a news feed by the group Media Awareness Project (MAP). NORML has links on its home page to to MAP's news feed, but not the articles or any portions of them. Instead, MAP allegedly reproduced the articles on its own site, but on a page that had some of NORML's branding.

"For NORML to be a defendant in this just seems absurd," says Marc Randazza, one of the organization's lawyers. "What they are accused of is providing a link to another Web site that may or may not have been infringing." Randazza adds that NORML had no reason to suspect that MAP would be accused of infringing copyright with its news feed.