I had been working on a Copyright enforcement company modeled on Patent Trolls, but, in my opinion, operating for good. The idea is to buy up the copyright on content that you know is being infringed on and then sue the infringers. I got side tracked by other things that seemed faster and easier, but I still wish someone would take up this idea and use it to purge the internet of large-scale willful plagiarizers.

This is not about suing platforms like YouTube. What clued me in to this opportunity was actually the company Upcounsel, which is/was a sort of eLance for lawyers. I caught them cut and pasting one of my articles. When I looked into it more deeply, it looked like they'd hired an SEO firm to build a massive content farm around the basic strategy of taking the top two results for a search term, merging the content into a single article, rearranging a few words, and then publishing the result as their own.

All of those articles live in one of their sitemaps. It's about 10k articles. I spot checked them and could find the original plagiarized sources for 70% of these articles within five clicks. Just search the article title and start clicking on other search results. So that's maybe 14k potential instances of copyright infringement.

The reason I thought Upcounsel was a reasonable target is for two reasons.

A) They passed my own moral filter, which is higher than just "what makes me money." I think it's outrageous to pass off plagiarized legal advice as legitimate. These are people who should know better too. And I reported this to one of their investors who reported it to their CEO, so I know they know.

B) They briefly had money. It actually seems a little bit expensive to file these lawsuits. I'm not 100% on the details, but it's things like needing to actually register the copyright ($800) and only have the ability to sue in federal court ($10k to really get going). Upcounsel raised a $12M round and I thought you could probably win a chunk of that just for the fact that an embarrassing lawsuit could really cripple a company that's trying to move quickly from milestone to milestone.

The key to making the financial side work is proving willful infringement. That can allow up to $150k/instance.

The key operational issue for this side project it a process for buying copyright. I never practiced the actual pitch. "Hi, I want to buy your copyright for the purpose of suing someone who is infringing on it. I will give you a perpetual license back, i.e. I have no interest in using this content myself." There are a couple of variants on the pitch and you'd probably have to experiment.

This is something that really needs a lawyer and I only talked to a lawyer about one issue. I bought a session with someone on Upcounsel (thinking that using their services to sue them would make for a good story). And what I asked was about acquiring of copyright. Would it be enough to just acquire a license or would I need to be the actual copyright holder? I thought the license would make for an easier pitch to copyright holders. But the legal advice I got was very clear that I needed to be the actual copyright holder in order to file suit.

Part of the underlying theory here is my belief that this work was done for Upcounsel by an SEO firm rather than invented in house. If it's a firm, then that means there are other past clients who would be targets for a lawsuit. Unfortunately, Upcounsel has basically announced they've gone out of business and so they aren't a good target anymore.

Summing all that up, it looked like a decent risk where you might spend $50-100k per target to win/settle for $500k+ with the most annoying thing probably being how slow this would move. That's a good business, right? Plus, these people are in the wrong, so it's something you could feel good about. I mean--suing people is a pretty violent act. But the target balances it out. You'd be like Omar in The Wire executing Rip&Runs on drug dealers.

Last, as a publisher myself, this sort of thing wouldn't worry me. I'm sure one of our authors has passed plagiarism by us, but there's no way we ware willful infringers. We pass articles through plagiarism checkers, respond immediately to reports, ban authors, etc. What makes this whole idea work is that there are companies now who made plagiarism core to their business strategy. They aren't necessarily wrong to do this since there aren't any forces, legal or social, which seem to be punishing them.