Righthaven was apparently found to be in the unique situation that no market existed for any of the IP it owned — Righthaven never sold articles. From the point of view of the Las Vegas Sun this would be burning business bridges, as someone might want to purchase licenses to reprint a lot of copies of something the Sun ran every now and then, which would be impossible because the rights are now stuck until kingdom come with Righthaven, but that’s the Sun’s problem. The legal problem it creates for Righthaven is that in a court’s discretionary power to declare a use of copyrighted IP to be fair use, one of the factors the court must look at is the impact of the proposed use upon the potential market. If there is no potential market, if the idea is simply to sit upon the IP and deny it to others forever, this could ironically all but force a finding of fair use.
Thanks for the comments. They seem reasonable to me. What is rather sad, is that this probably won’t have broad implications since Righthaven wasn’t blocking the fair use of it’s own materials.