. . . or other words I have to look up the definition for before I use them, but my idle thought is that it seems that Righthaven’s legal troubles, namely that it may not have the standing to sue under its agreement relating to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s copyrights, are potentially solvable (if the problem is defined as a copyright owner wanting its content protected efficiently while also protecting its reputation).   The copyright author could deposit its copyrights in some blandly named IP holding company (this assumes that the LVRJ didn’t want to be the named plaintiff for, among other reasons, optics), and the ‘Righthaven’ role is played by a law firm working on some sort of contingency basis. Plus the law firm indemnifies the IP Holding company in the event of a Section 505 fee switch.

Now to be clear, in the Righthaven model, Righthaven is making decisions.  In the contingency model, the client is (supposed to).  As a practical matter, if the litigations are perceived to be ‘cookie-cutter,’ the client may be tempted to delegate a lot of authority to the law firm.   Which can be problematic for a variety of reason.

Thanks to Prof Goldman for chewing the fat on this.