The Trauma Intervention Program (TIP) of Southern Nevada is a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers to the site of severe accidents, suicides, fires, and violent theft. The volunteers comfort family members, witnesses, and bystanders - traumatized people who can't be helped by anything found in an ambulance.

TIP might seem an unlikely target for a federal copyright lawsuit, but it found itself hauled into court last week for posting 14 local newspaper articles about TIP and its volunteers to the group's website. In most of the articles, TIP volunteers are the main sources for the reporters, providing plenty of quotes and (sometimes jarring) anecdotes about their work.

The lawsuit was filed by a company named Righthaven, an entrepreneurial venture formed by a Vegas attorney and the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was filed without warning or notice, and it seeks more than just statutory damages and attorneys' fees; it asks the court to "direct GoDaddy and any successor domain name registrar for the Domain to lock the Domain and transfer control of the Domain to Righthaven."

What kind of news operation files federal lawsuits without warning against its own sources and then tries to take control of their Internet address? Well - Righthaven does, and it has filed more than a hundred similar lawsuits since setting up shop earlier this year. All target small operators and bloggers, including one against a blogger so small-time he gets about twenty hits a day.

None of the suits have yet gone to trial, though many have been settled privately. The Las Vegas Sun, a competing newspaper that has been chronicling the Righthaven saga, reported in August that 22 of the suits had been settled; most terms were private, but "court filings revealed two defendants paid $2,185 and $5,000, respectively, to close their cases." (The $2,185 came from NORML, which works to reform marijuana laws.) No one has apparently turned over a domain name.

Is this really what the Las Vegas Review-Journal thought it would be getting when it decided to "protect its content"?

Righthaven scans the Web for potential infringements of Las Vegas Review-Journal articles, then licenses those articles from the paper. Newspaper articles are automatically copyrighted, but few are ever "registered" officially with the Copyright Office. Righthaven files a registration after obtaining a license; once it has done that, it files a lawsuit.

To date, the company has gone after an odd assortment of characters, including everyone from Wehategringos.com to the Hepatitis C Support Project to Second Amendment Sisters to the American Society of Safety Engineers, along with numerous individuals.

There are occasional high-profile targets; last week, Righthaven went after Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, again seeking her domain name after Angle's campaign posted numerous, complete articles to its website.

Righthaven has also targeted the sources for some of the articles it controls, a nearly unheard-of practice in journalism. Without the willingness of sources to speak with reporters (and free of charge), the Review-Journal couldn't have written most of its TIP stories in the first place. Whatever the legality of these suits, they would seem counterproductive as a business measure. What sources would want to participate in such an operation?

Responding to criticism of the practice, Righthaven boss Steven Gibson said this summer that he was pondering some changes to limit lawsuits against sources. "But I’m not giving them a blanket waiver," he told the Las Vegas Sun. (Righthaven did not respond to our request for comment on the TIP case.)