You’re probably right.
I just get damned sick of folks who write stuff posting it
in full all over creation but excerpting it here on Free Republic.
The vast majority of them do it to get blog hits, treating us as a hit farm.
I get a bit obsessive about it sometimes.
People who own something — whether it's a website or a newspaper or any other business — get to set the rules and I have never disputed that Free Republic has every right to mandate full-text rather than excerpts of articles.
There was a day that pretty much nobody needed to know about the details of copyright law except book, magazine and newspaper publishers. Anyone with enough money to own a printing press also had enough money to pay a lawyer, and because of that, the problems pretty much took care of themselves. Our key cases in litigation of copyright law came about because major publishers with names like Hearst sued each other in the 1800s and early 1900s over loopholes or perceived ambiguities in the law, and well-paid lawyers did a good job of arguing the merits of each side. Sometimes the Congress amended the copyright law; more often, the issues were left to the courts which in those days were more interested in interpreting the law than making new laws.
Today, however, we now run a very serious risk of horrible legal precedents being set because large but dying newspapers have a strong economic incentive to sue website owners who don't have enough money to mount as effective of a legal defense. There's a big drive being mounted by Rupert Murdoch of FOX News to push for paid content rather than advertiser-supported websites, and a bad precedent with a lawsuit won against a website whose owner doesn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars for lawyer bills could result in really, really bad precedents which would not have happened if the two parties were more equally matched and able to afford good legal defenses.
Sometimes the guy who wins in court is the one who can pay the best lawyer, not the one with the best case.
And, for the record, I’ve never posted any article I’ve written “in full” anywhere except the website that paid me for said article and the two vanities I wrote over a 10-year timeframe on Free Republic. Articles for which I did not receive payment that were posted to my personal blog HAVE been posted to FR in their entirety. Perhaps one day you’ll realize we’re not all out to get FR and some of us do care to share what information we have, allbeit limited due to contractural obligations. Hopefully, we can start off on new footing?