Posted on 07/04/2009 10:47:18 PM PDT by Blogger
Those who wish to keep the internet free and open had best dust off their legal arguments. One of America's most influential conservative judges, Richard Posner, has proposed a ban on linking to online content without permission. The idea, he said in a blog post last week, is to prevent aggregators and bloggers from linking to newspaper websites without paying: Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion. Posner's notion set off an eruption from the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Matt Welch and Erick Schonfeld, among others. And they are right to be furious. Not only would Posner stop online media dead in their tracks, but he would also overturn long-established rules of fair use, which, among others things, allow for the reproduction of short excerpts of copyrighted material for the purposes of commentary, parody and the like – precisely what bloggers and aggregators do all the time.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
FYI
This is really bogus. When I freelanced for a newspaper, they refused to post my news stories on their site, saying the freelancers actually held a copyright to their own stories. B.S.
Would posting the url without a link be illegal too?
Since when is it a judge’s job to propose anything?
Any online information provider can block access to those without a subscription/authorization as they choose. They don’t need a judge to prevent or otherwise control it.
Posner needs to get a clue.
It ain’t. It’s his private comments. But at least Posner is honoring the principle that this kind of policy change may only happen at the behest of legislators.
When he wants attention.
This Judge's judgment seems faulty, and his modest proposal is gonna sink like a lead ballon
This is madness, the internet age will mean the end of all copyright as it has previously been known. And this buffoon seeks to expand copyright exponentially...he is nuts.
In the digital age you can either have free access to all data or a police state...these are the only two choices.
The upshot of this would be to stifle debate.
I don’t get the need to do this. If there are ads at the article they get seen by more people this way.
Block linking, and the news sights would die.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not forking over a subscription for hundreds of sites.
Does this apply to books as well? For ex: when an author refers to a quote from another book?
If the idiots running the old media had any brains (which most of them don’t, being libdolts), they’d understand that those links are essentially very effective FREE ADVERTISING. Sheesh.
What the heck does it mean for a judge to “propose” anything? They rule according to the law when a case comes before them; and if this guy is a conservative judge than he should know that.
Linking should NOT be illegal. Linking doesn’t infringe upon anything. Linking is like referring. Should suggesting a good newspaper or magazine be illegal? Of course not. Linking is the same thing.
Will legal jihad silence online critics of Islam?
Snippet: When Internet journalist Joe Kaufman wrote an article exposing terrorist connections in two American Muslim groups, he was sued by a swarm of Islamic organizations, none of which he had mentioned in his online article.
The technique is called by some "legal jihad" or "Islamist lawfare," and the Thomas More Law Center, which is representing Kaufman in the lawsuit, claims Muslim advocates are using the strategy to bully online journalists into silence.
He understands, as few do, that this kind of policy change is unlikely to be had no matter how many suits are filed under present law.
Bingo! You don’t want linked to by anyone else (something for which people pay Google a fortune)? Fine. Disappear from the web except for direct subscribers. And even they usually link through a third party server, so disappear from there, too.
Idiots.
The new "conservative news" could then be resold to conservative-oriented subscriber sites at rates just high enough to compensate the original authors (and the second-tier publishers who review the submitted articles).
It seems to me like this "disruptive technology" would be using liberals' own infrastructure against them.
Any thoughts on this anyone?
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