… here, at Boing Boing.

For your blogger’s small role in this tale, type Righthaven into her search engine.

Righthaven, which sued your blogger (search RIGHTHAVEN on this blog), has been dying by inches for more than a year. Now a judge has killed it off entirely, having taken away all of its copyrights (Righthaven was a copyright troll) in an effort to collect on some of the outfit’s many debts.

The only question left to old UD, as this post’s headline suggests, is whether she wants to try recovering damages.

The defendants may go after the Review-Journal, the Denver Post and Righthaven’s investors — [attorney Steve] Gibson and the owner of the Review-Journal — since Righthaven itself doesn’t seem to have any assets they can go after.

… ‘reasonable force’ to execute the judgment.”

UD‘s strange legal education continues. Righthaven, the copyright troll that last year sued her, now faces, Bloomberg Business Week reports, the police at the door. They won’t pay any of the many large judgments (more are on the way) assessed against them for their losses in court.

Strange to think that the frighteningly legitimate thing that came bristling up to UD‘s door with a summons last summer turns out to have been what looks more and more like a high-risk, inept conspiracy about to declare bankruptcy. I suppose it’s a measure of UD‘s naivety that this never occurred to her; that she fixed only on the threatening, baffling language of a complaint against her, and not on the possibility that behind the formal machinery and dread-inducing rhetoric lay seven swaggering cocksmen with a can’t miss scheme. Six, seven.

At the moment, Righthaven seems to be down to one guy. His cock must be steamrolled flat.

… in which UD has played a small part, here’s Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, on recent events:

I know many folks get a thrill from watching Righthaven implode, but I must confess that I feel no schadenfreude. Yes, it’s fun (in a bloodsport way) to watch judicial benchslaps. Yes, of course, Righthaven has been a plague on our community, so having them driven out would be welcome relief. Yes, they have contributed to a nice body of defense-favorable precedent. Yet, using the powerful tools of our judicial system, Righthaven has imposed significant financial and emotional costs on hundreds of victims. I feel sad for the victims who have had to fight back for their rights at the peril of losing their homes, and I feel sad that we as a society have accepted a litigation system that allows a scheme like Righthaven to harm for ordinary well-meaning citizens trying to do the right thing. A judicial crushing of Righthaven is inadequate restitution for these victims, so I remain sad about the overall situation.

Wired surveys the night of the living dead which is Righthaven, the company which has the distinction of having sued your blogger, UD.

That’s all test centers in the entire Republic of Korea. Pretty amazing country – cheaters, plagiarists, as far as the eye can see. UD has covered endemic plagiarism there; now it looks as though charging people lots of money for getting SAT questions in advance is also pretty close to endemic. Details, if you can stomach them, here.

Speaking of cheaters, the outfit that sued your blogger and hundreds of others lo these many years ago (refresh your memory here – scroll down) is of course no longer an outfit, having been eviscerated by this country’s legal system. In case you thought there was no more pain our courts could inflict on these trolls, get a load of this happy news.

Keep it coming.

Longtime readers may recall UD‘s encounter two summers ago with a Las Vegas law firm or company or whatever they were (they don’t seem to exist, much, anymore).

The guy who did her was Coons.

… who came to her door two summers ago with legal papers. But life is strange.

It’s not quite over for copyright troll Righthaven (its owner will probably be appearing in court soon for a debtor examination), but as the attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation note, EFF’s latest court victory – in which Stevens Media, financial backer of Righthaven, conceded that “posting a short excerpt of a news article in an online forum is not copyright infringement” – constitutes a decisive victory against the outfit that went after, among hundreds of other blogs, University Diaries.

Christopher Hitchens got a big laugh when, asked what the purpose of life without a belief in God would be, he answered “Gloating over the misfortunes of other people… Crowing over [their] miseries…” UD laughs whenever she watches him say this too…

Yet the astoundingly tanking fortunes of the outfit that last year sued UD has her thinking with some seriousness about schadenfreude. No doubt she’s got her share of it… But as one story after another of the financial desperation of the now universally ridiculed and reviled Righthaven pops up as a Google Alert in her email, she finds herself remarkably deficient in this response. The copyright troll whose threats and legal papers so frightened her two summers ago is this year a virtually bankrupt joke, taking outrageous beatings in every court it’s dragged into by people and organizations who – unlike UD – fought back.

Instead of anything emotional, UD seems to be experiencing that rather calmer it-is-meet-and-right thing that involves witnessing the reversal of wrongdoing.

… she often assigns David Mamet’s play (it’s also a film), Glengarry Glen Ross, all about slimy businessmen.

She’s delighted to see attorneys in one of the many Righthaven suits (for UD‘s involvement in this sorry story, go here) turning to literature to encompass the specific unpleasantness of the Righthaven scandal (for details of this filing, go here):

In Glengarry Glen Ross, Ricky Roma says to George Aaronow, “Always tell the truth – It’s the easiest thing to remember.” Had Righthaven followed this simple bit of wisdom, it would not find itself in its current thicket of predicament in Nevada, and it might find its fortune in Colorado to be more promising.

Righthaven’s scheme is based upon “Assignments” of copyrights from news entities to itself. When such assignments are honest and bona fide transfers of rights, they are remarkably simple – the copyright owner simply transfers all title to the copyright to the new owner. Righthaven’s scheme is much more complex, because there is so much dishonesty to obfuscate. In 1992, Glengarry Glen Ross was made into a film with the tagline “Lie. Cheat. Steal. All In A Day’s Work.” Righthaven should have watched the entire film and learned from Ricky Roma; instead it relied upon the tagline and has lied, cheated, and stolen from dozens of hapless defendants in Nevada and in Colorado. That conduct ends in Colorado with this Reply Brief.

More on Righthaven here.

UD‘s been having rather trying summers lately.

True, she doesn’t teach during the summer, which means that her reading and writing time is her own. This fact alone makes her summers enviable from the point of view of most people, who have to go to workplaces.

On the other hand, last summer, as she prepared to go to her houselet in the hills of upstate NY, Righthaven came calling. No traditional birthday dinner for UD at Woodstock’s Bear Cafe. She had to stay home and deal with that.

This summer, which was going to involve a variation on the Bear Cafe birthday — an event at Peter Galbraith’s house in Vermont was planned — is also messed up, because she’s having surgery mid-August. Nothing scary, but she’ll need a few weeks recovery, etc.

Mr UD came up with the idea of their taking a little trip the week before the surgery, so today they drive to a bed and breakfast in Luray Virginia, where they will explore caves (this will impress you). UD will of course blog throughout the week.

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Longtime readers know that Les UDs – for reasons of Soltan family history – own a fifty-acre snail farm in Latgale, Latvia, not far from the town of Rezekne. (“It’s not a snail farm,” Mr UD just said, and indeed no snail farming goes on there; but someone imported snails to the property a long time ago, and they’re crawling all over the place, and someday maybe we’ll farm them, so I call it our Latvian snail farm.)

Time and priorities being what they are, UD has never spent a summer, or any other season, on the snail farm, but there’s a story in today’s news that reminds her she should visit the region.

Vilnius, Lithuania is a couple of hours away from the snails, and its mayor the other day took an armored vehicle and crushed a car illegally parked in a bicycles only lane.

Last summer, at just this time, my freedom to blog ended.

I lay next to my husband in bed one afternoon and said to him:

I’m going to stop. I’m going to shut the whole thing down and not write another word. This firm that has sued me – Righthaven – they could sue me again, for something else I’ve excerpted from a newspaper. Any other firm with the Righthaven business model could also sue me. Righthaven is seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. They’re going to take my domain name. All because I excerpted part of a newspaper article. I named and linked back to the source of that excerpt, the way millions of bloggers do every day. I got no commercial benefit from it, because my blog has no advertising. But a man just came to our door and served me with legal papers that say that if I lose this copyright infringement case they’ve filed against me we will be ruined. I don’t have any choice. I have to shut down University Diaries.

My husband looked at me and said

No you don’t. No you won’t. Do some research. Find out about Righthaven. What they’re doing sounds completely nuts. We’re talking about a total – and seemingly unfounded – threat to your freedom to express yourself. Calm down. Keep a cool head. Call a lawyer who knows something about this.

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Now that the Righthaven enterprise is collapsing – now that they’re losing all of their cases (I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven), now that their legal staff is abandoning them (The Righthaven lawyer who sued me has expressed regrets about having worked for Righthaven. If I were facing the possibility of lawsuits and sanctions because of my association with Righthaven, I’d say the same thing. Yet in our phone chats, this person was thrilled with his job. Quite the eager beaver.), now that numerous judges have said that Righthaven never had standing to sue in the first place, I can look back on this experience and see that it was a lesson, a hard lesson, for UD, in American freedom, and in the rule of law that sustains American freedom.

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It was also a lesson in trust. Having decided to settle with Righthaven rather than pay who knows how much and suffer how much protracted misery to defend myself, I could have become cynical about a legal system that can prey on people like me and chill their speech.

Instead, I’ve watched one judge after another express rage against Righthaven for what it’s done. I’ve watched public interest outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take on pro bono cases for Righthaven targets and win them big. I’ve watched legal and free speech groups all over the country respond aggressively and successfully to this threat.

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Back to last summer. I talked to a lawyer – a wonderful man who told me exactly how to get Righthaven out of my life right away, which is all I wanted.

Throw money at them. They only want money. They have zero interest in going to court. Tell them you’ll give them this much (He named an amount.) and they’ll take it. Or they’ll ask for a little more…. But are you sure you don’t want to litigate? We’re eager to defend you. We’re eager to shut Righthaven down. You will without question win the case.

What would it entail?

Well, first we’d have to depose you… How much experience have you had of the law?

Okay. Send them an email. Remember to say (He told me exactly how to word it.). And if you have any questions or concerns at all as this moves forward, I want you to call me.

What do I owe you?

Nothing.

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A day later I’m at a doctor’s appointment and my cell phone rings and it’s eager beaver. We begin negotiating. I say to my doctor

I know how obnoxious it is for someone to interrupt what’s going on and talk on their cell phone. I’d never think of doing this ordinarily; but I’ve simply got to get through this conversation now.

He nodded and said he’d be back in a few minutes.

And that was it. The rest was signing and faxing and scanning, end of story.

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Of course they’d frightened me right down to the ground. Of course I was very angry. But I had the money to make Righthaven go away very fast. Many of its other targets don’t, and it’s been painful to follow their stories.

Like me, most of these people write non-commercial blogs with an interest in – as UD‘s tagline goes – changing things in American political and social life. Many are retirees, veterans, disabled people. For months now, their lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.

That’s pretty much over now. Although things are still ugly, and Righthaven, cornered, continues to snarl, it’s gradually being put down. Beset by people fighting back and draining the firm’s resources, and, again, currently facing sanction, Righthaven seems to have stopped filing new cases. Already filed cases are being dismissed en masse.

Yet a lot of damage has been done, and that’s damage that you don’t ever really undo, even if you compensate people.

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The upside (UD, a ridiculously obstinate optimist, always looks on the bright side) of this experience, viewed now from the distance of a year and from the knowledge of Righthaven’s likely collapse, is pretty obvious. This Fourth of July, none of it is abstract. None of it is patriotic bromides. I’ve had my run-in with unfreedom, and I’ve watched the institutions of my country take firm action against unfreedom.

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UPDATE.

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Another update.

… people are paying attention to today’s Supreme Court ruling on violent video games; but there’s a smaller free speech story, also today, involving the South Carolina Supreme Court, that’s arguably more important.

I’m talking about the ongoing implosion of Righthaven, generally referred to as a copyright troll. (Background here.) As Steve Green reports in Vegas Inc., two groups in South Carolina have now

asked the court to find that Righthaven’s business model is the “unauthorized practice of law” and to “enjoin Righthaven from operating in South Carolina.”

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Everyone who blogs has an interest in the fate of Righthaven, which, according to the complaint before the South Carolina court, “subjects [bloggers] to endless litigation over injuries it did not suffer for claims it does not own.”

The Righthaven company, typically referred to as a copyright troll, has over the last year or so come at many bloggers with copyright violation lawsuits.

Now a judge has ruled that Righthaven never had legal standing to sue, and will probably be sanctioned for dishonesty.

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UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation comments:

“This kind of copyright trolling from Righthaven and Stephens Media has undermined free and open discussion on the Internet, scaring people out of sharing information and discussing the news of the day,” said [an EFF attorney]. “We hope this is the beginning of the end of this shameful litigation campaign.”

“To Righthaven and Stephens Media, the Court has issued a stinging rebuke,” added [another]. “For those desiring to resist the bullying of claims brought by pseudo-claimants of copyright interests, the ruling today represents a dramatic and far reaching victory.”

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Steve Green, the Las Vegas reporter who has owned the Righthaven story, concludes:

[F]ederal judges don’t appreciate their courtrooms being used as ATM machines by Righthaven.

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UPDATE: Eric Johnson, a specialist in copyright law, draws some moral conclusions:

Righthaven lawyers constructed a sham transaction, and then made multiple misrepresentations to courts and third parties in order to hide the sham nature of the transaction. This was done in a bid to get a number of unsophisticated, unrepresented defendants to fork over substantial settlement payments, largely out of fear or because of their financial inability to mount a defense.

The potential to pervert our civil justice system in this way is one of the most important reasons attorneys are required to demonstrate a high moral character as a prerequisite to receiving a license to practice law. Righthaven’s behavior, in my opinion, is incompatible with that standard.

He anticipates the disbarment of Righthaven attorneys.

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If you want to read some of the best prose UD has ever seen, read this. When the history of Righthaven is written, paragraphs and paragraphs from this letter will be front and center.