Singleton hires muscle to enforce intellectual property rights

Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group has hired a Las Vegas firm to file legal challenges against what the newspaper company defines as copyright infringement. Wired magazine reports:

Las Vegas–based Righthaven was formed this spring for the sole purpose of acquiring copyrights and suing to financially benefit from allegedly misappropriated intellectual property. It has filed more than 180 suits on behalf of Stephens Media’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, and has now begun suing on behalf of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post and about two dozen other outlets.

Righthaven’s initial lawsuit on behalf of the Denver Post, first reported by the Las Vegas Sun, came three weeks after the paper published online a “notice to readers about Denver Post copyright protections.” The five-paragraph notice said the newspaper’s work “is illegally reproduced everyday on websites across the country.” The company wrote it was acceptable for blogs to “reproduce no more than a headline and up to a couple of paragraphs or summary of the story.”

The crackdown promises to get more aggressive as MediaNews prepares to build paywalls around its newspaper sites.