Prices slashed on Righthaven copyrights up for auction

Certain copyrights seized from Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas are being offered at auction for a minimum bid of $50 apiece — a 50 percent discount.

Lara Pearson, the court-appointed attorney auctioning Righthaven assets for the benefit of creditors owed $188,927, said Thursday that Righthaven’s trademark sold in the latest auction this week on eBay for $1,025. She didn’t immediately identify the buyer.

Pearson has launched a new auction for 17 federal copyright registrations seized from Righthaven covering two adult movies and 15 pieces of outdated sports betting material originally created by a company called Stevo Design.

A copyright for a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial had been part of this week’s auction, but it didn’t sell and it was removed from the auction for undisclosed reasons.

Righthaven, a Las Vegas company, obtained copyrights so it could profit by suing alleged infringers of material from newspapers. Assignments of copyrights to Righthaven from the Review-Journal and the Denver Post didn’t stand up in court as judges rejected Righthaven’s standing to sue.

For that reason, it’s unclear what value, if any, its newspaper copyrights have. It’s unknown if the copyright for the R-J editorial was withdrawn from the auction because of those uncertainties or whether Righthaven, the R-J and Stephens Media LLC, owner of the R-J, had threatened legal action over the auction.

A Stephens Media affiliate is a 50 percent owner of Righthaven, along with Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson.

Pearson initially listed the copyrights for the sports-betting material, which did not involve any newspaper, and the porn movies for $100 apiece.

They’re now being offered for $50 apiece on eBay in an auction ending at 5 p.m. PDT Saturday.

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