By David Kravets

(Wired) Steve Gib­son has a plan to save the media world’s finan­cial cri­sis — and it’s not the iPad.

Bor­row­ing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledg­ling Las Vegas-​​based Righthaven has begun buy­ing out the copy­rights to news­pa­per con­tent for the sole pur­pose of suing blogs and web­sites that re-​​post those arti­cles with­out per­mis­sion. And he says he’s mak­ing money.

“We believe it’s the best solu­tion out there,” Gib­son says. “Media com­pa­nies’ assets are very much their copy­rights. These com­pa­nies need to under­stand and appre­ci­ate that those assets have value more than merely the present adver­tis­ing revenues.”

Gibson’s vision is to mon­e­tize news con­tent on the back­end, by scour­ing the inter­net for infring­ing copies of his client’s arti­cles, then suing and rely­ing on the harsh penal­ties in the Copy­right Act — up to $150,000 for a sin­gle infringe­ment — to com­pel quick set­tle­ments. Since Righthaven’s for­ma­tion in March, the com­pany has filed at least 80 fed­eral law­suits against web­site oper­a­tors and indi­vid­ual blog­gers who’ve re-​​posted arti­cles from the Las Vegas Review-​​Journal, his first client.

Read the rest: News­pa­per Chain’s New Busi­ness Plan: Copy­right Suits | Threat Level | Wired​.com.