Harry Wall One commentator describes Harry Wall, husband of nineteenth-century British comic singer Annie Wall, as the world's first copyright troll. Wall set up "the Authors', Composers' and Artists' Copyright Protection Office", to collect fees for unauthorized performances of works by composers (often deceased) based on the threat of litigation for
statutory damages under the
Dramatic Copyright Act of 1842.
Related to Google The term was also applied to two parties that separately sued
Google in 2006, after posting content they knew would be indexed by
Google's
Googlebot spider, with the industry standard "
noindex" opt-out tags deliberately omitted. After
Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google Inc., adult magazine
Perfect 10 was described as a copyright troll for setting up image links with the intent to sue Google for infringement after Google added them to its image search service. More recently, the term has been used to describe entities that bring questionable claims against companies in the fashion industry over purported copyrights in fabric patterns.
Righthaven In 2010, copyright holding company
Righthaven LLC was called a copyright troll by commentators, after it purchased copyrights to a number of old news articles from
Stephens Media, at the time the publisher of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal, based on a
business model of suing bloggers and other Internet authors for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission. The matter was covered by the
Los Angeles Times,
Bloomberg News,
Wired News,
Mother Jones,
The Wall Street Journal, the
Boston Herald, and other newspapers and news blogs, as well as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, which offered to assist the defendants. The paper's competitor, the
Las Vegas Sun, covered all 107 of the lawsuits as of September 1, 2010, In August, 2010, the company entered an agreement with
WEHCO Media in Arkansas to pursue similar actions, and announced that it was in negotiation with a number of other publishers.
Wired magazine described the activity as "borrowing a page from the patent trolls", and noted that the company was demanding $75,000 from each infringer, and agreeing to settlements of several thousand dollars per defendant. By the second half of 2011, defendants with resources to fight Righthaven in court were winning cases on grounds that their usage fell within the
fair use doctrine and that Stephens Media had actually not assigned full ownership of the copyrighted material to Righthaven. Righthaven was also sanctioned by at least one judge for failing to disclose that Stephens Media got a 50 percent cut of any lawsuit proceeds involving the
Review-Journal. Successful defendants demanded court costs and legal fees, which Righthaven refused to pay. By December 2011, Righthaven was insolvent and on the auction block.
Visual Rights Group In 2021, the term was used by a Belgian judge in reference to Permission Machine, which later changed its name to Visual Rights Group. This company scanned photos on the internet and sent large damage claims without asking for the removal of the material. In a case of 2 October 2024 the Court of Appeal of Antwerp dismissed this argument and praised the activities of these companies as necessary for the photographers and authors to uphold their rights.
Strike 3 An American copyright trolling company,
Strike 3, specializes in "porno-trolling", or accusing people of illegally downloading pornography, and offers to settle for just below the cost of legal representation, which almost all defendants do. In 2025, Strike 3 accounted for half of all federal copyright cases filed in the U.S. ==Legal defense==