Righthaven LLC v. Sumner [1]

Righthaven LLC, a Las Vegas company associated with Las Vegas Review-Journal owner Stephens Media LLC, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against William Sumner and DailyKix.com.  Righthaven alleged [2] that Sumner used a photo copied from the Denver Post without permission on the social media aggregator website DailyKix.com [3].

Sumner filed a motion to dismiss [4] for lack of personal jurisdiction in response.   Sumner, a Georgia resident, argued that the court lacks general jurisdiction over him because neither he nor his website, which resides on a server in Kansas, has continuous and systematic contacts with Colorado.  And Sumner argued that the court lacks specific jurisdiction over him because he never purposefully availed himself of operating in Colorado.  Sumner noted that the allegedly infringing photograph was auto-populated by the DailyKix's automatic aggregation algorithyms, and not by any intentional activity on his part.

Sumner also argued that DailyKix.com, as a website without any sort of associated business entity, should be dismissed as an improper defendant because it lacks the capacity to be sued.