from www.techdirt.com – As you may recall, when the federal district court in Nevada granted Marc Randazza’s request to turn Righthaven’s assets over to a receiver, for the sake of using them to satisfy the court ordered attorneys’ fees in the Hoehn case, the court also ordered — pretty damn clearly — that Righthaven’s principles, Steve Gibson [pictured] and Raisha “Drizzle” Y. Gibson, appear in court on January 5th.

Already, we knew that Righthaven had failed — as required by the court — to produce certain documents a week prior to this hearing (for which Randazza has asked the court to declare Righthaven in contempt). You may notice that the date on the calendar is now January 6th.

It’s one thing to ignore opposing counsel. It’s another to ignore multiple direct court orders, including one to appear in court. But… neither Gibson showed up in court yesterday. Nor did Righthaven’s main lawyer: Shawn Mangano. According to Randazza, the judge then called Mangano who claimed that he “thought it was tomorrow” (but did not explain the failure to deliver the required documents).

This is pretty amazing. We’ve had people in our comments repeatedly asking about the January 5th deadline. If a bunch of our commenters can keep the date straight, can’t the lawyer for the company being dragged into court?

As I said, Righthaven’s ability to do exactly the wrong thing at nearly every opportunity is stunning. And every time we think we can’t be surprised any more, something like this happens. This is the most amazing study in incompetence we’ve ever seen.

This is a company that failed to properly secure the copyrights it was suing over, chose not to use the DMCA’s takedown procedures, often targeted questionable cases of infringement, sued people over clear fair use situations, used a completely bogus demand for domain names in the lawsuits it filed, has been accused of theunauthorized practice of law in multiple states, failed to list Stephens Media as an interested party as required by Nevada law (for which it was sanctioned), failed to file many documents on time, missed deadlines for certain important filings, failed to pay attorneys’ fees owed, lost cases due not just to the failure to secure copyright properly but also to missing deadlines, had an appeal thrown out for failing to follow proper procedure… and, has been sued by their own process server for failure to pay its bills. And now this (and I’m probably missing some stuff!).

The judge has set a new hearing date for Monday, January 9th at 9am. I can’t imagine that the Gibsons and Mangano could possibly think they can get away with missing that one, too — but if you had asked, I never would have believed most of the things that Righthaven has done so far would ever happen in real life.