Righthaven, the Las Vegas operation that sought to turn newspaper article copyright lawsuits into a business model, can now slap a date on its death certificate: May 9, 2013. This morning, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on the two Righthaven appeals that could have given the firm a final glimmer of hope—and the court told Righthaven to take a hike (PDF).

"Abraham Lincoln told a story about a lawyer who tried to establish that a calf had five legs by calling its tail a leg. But the calf had only four legs, Lincoln observed, because calling a tail a leg does not make it so," the opinion begins.

"Before us is a case about a lawyer who tried to establish that a company owned a copyright by drafting a contract calling the company the copyright owner, even though the company lacked the rights associated with copyright ownership. Heeding Lincoln's wisdom, and the requirements of the Copyright Act, we conclude that merely calling someone a copyright owner does not make it so."

Righthaven's grand plan was to license articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, find people who had posted pieces of those articles online, then threaten those people with massive statutory damages unless they sent in checks for a couple thousand dollars. This proved hugely controversial, largely because it involved Righthaven threatening all manner of appealing defendants—up to and including sources for Review-Journal stories and an Ars Technica author.

Righthaven was run by lawyers, but those lawyers made a major mistake: they never actually assigned the copyrights in the newspaper articles to Righthaven. What they did assign was, in the court's words, "the right to sue for infringement." No such right exists in US copyright law, however, and since the Review-Journal maintained functional control over the exploitation of those copyrights, Righthaven had no standing to bring its lawsuits.

Righthaven made all sorts of arguments that it really did control the copyrights in the articles, but the Ninth Circuit didn't like any of them. All such arguments were like that made by the lawyer in Lincoln's story—Righthaven could assert that it was the copyright owner, but the judges said this was mere "form over substance." Calling oneself the copyright owner doesn't make it so; one has to look at the rights that are actually conveyed.

The Righthaven story has been a pathetic one for some time; the company's assets were seized, its domain name and copyrights were sold off, and money was paid to defense lawyers. In the absence of a future (and deeply unlikely) Supreme Court appeal, Righthaven is now done. Why did it even continue to fight for this long? Marc Randazza, the lawyer who helped bring Righthaven down, told us back in February that the appeal was "a tantrum and an attempt to salve [Righthaven principal Steve Gibson's] ego. And I can almost respect that."

Update: In a press release today, Randazza said, “Copyright law exists to protect the creative process, and to reward authors–not to create illegitimate shakedown schemes. Everyone at the firm is proud of its role in bringing this matter to its conclusion. However, given Righthaven’s unwillingness to make rational choices, I expect a petition for the United States Supreme Court to hear the case. Stay tuned.”