From the article:
Righthaven asserts in court papers that it obtained exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the newspaper's articles from its parent company, Stephens Media, owned by Las Vegas Review-Journal president Sherman Frederick. Righthaven is run by intellectual property attorney Steven Gibson, who previously brought other, unrelated cases on behalf of Stephens Media.
It sounds to me like Righthaven deliberately bought distributor rights for the Review-Journal in order to initiate lawsuits.
Patent trolls move to copyright. But at least with copyright there's usually no question as to whether the subject matter subject to copyright.
That is exactly what they did.
It's like buying a fleet of ambulances so that you can chase them.
They are only using their copyright ownership rights in order to troll for lawsuits. They do not own the copyright in order to make money from the distribution of the written material. They bought it for the sole purpose of hunting down people who may have posted the material on a third party website.
This is about as low as you can get. The fact is that they are not making money on the distribution of the copyrighted material, but only on the alleged violation of the copyright. It's a scam.
Scumbags.
There are few better words for these worms.