Poynter is the latest outlet to highlight the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its Righthaven LLC lawyers who have made a new business model out of taking legal action against even the smallest blogs for posting Review-Journal material.

In a piece posted today at Poynter.org, Adam Hochberg -- an NPR scribe -- looks into Righthaven's practices and the small outlets hurt by them.

Citing as an example a Maryland blogger named Dean Mostofi, Hochberg writes:

Righthaven discovered that Mostofi had republished an article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal -- a nine-paragraph news story about a Nevada Supreme Court decision. Claiming that the copyright infringement had caused “irreparable harm,” Righthaven surprised Mostofi with a lawsuit that seeks to shut down deanmostofi.com and demands unspecified monetary damages.

“It's legal extortion,” said Mostofi, who fears he may be forced to pay a cash settlement to avoid the expense of a court fight. “They're going after small bloggers who can't afford representation.”

Mostofi is among dozens of website owners who've been sued this year by Righthaven and its partner, Stephens Media Group. Stephens owns the Review-Journal and more than 40 smaller newspapers, mostly in Nevada and Arkansas.

While there's long been simmering tension between mainstream news organizations and bloggers who republish articles, Stephens' aggressive legal strategy is unprecedented in the news industry. It's being closely watched by other publishers, while being widely condemned in the blogosphere.

“This is a classic battle between the old media and the new media, and the Internet is at stake,” said New Hampshire attorney Jeffrey Newman, who represents another blogger hit with a lawsuit. That blog, emtcity.com, which caters to emergency medical personnel, was sued after a visitor posted a Review-Journal article in a discussion forum.

Hochberg later states:

Since early spring, Righthaven has filed about a hundred lawsuits in federal court alleging infringement of Stephens' copyrights. While many target small-time bloggers such as a Boston woman who writes about her cat, others are directed at for-profit companies such as the gambling site Majorwager.com, or advocacy groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The suits are filed without warning; website owners are given no opportunity to remove the offending material before they're slapped with litigation.

“Our goal is to make sure our intellectual property rights are respected,” Stephens Media general counsel Mark Hinueber said in a phone interview. “We were seeing our entire work product in some stories just being right-clicked and cut and pasted into blogs, where people were selling Google ads around them and making money.”