It’s a known fact that newspapers are struggling; revenues are falling, readers are leaving, and interest in the medium is waning. To fight this Judge Richard Posner in one of his blog posts has some, well, interesting ideas:
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.
Basically, he’s saying we can’t link to newspapers without asking their implicit permission. Linking without that allowance is deemed a copyright infringement.
I have one word for such an idea:
Insane.
The internet is built upon links:
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. In 1989, Tim was working in a computing services section of CERN when he came up with the concept; at the time he had no idea that it would be implemented on such an enormous scale. Particle physics research often involves collaboration among institutes from all over the world. Tim had the idea of enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and pool together information. But far from simply making available a large number of research documents as files that could be downloaded to individual computers, he suggested that you could actually link the text in the files themselves.
In other words, there could be cross-references from one research paper to another. This would mean that while reading one research paper, you could quickly display part of another paper that holds directly relevant text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific and mathematical nature would thus be represented as a `web’ of information held in electronic form on computers across the world. This, Tim thought, could be done by using some form of hypertext, some way of linking documents together by using buttons on the screen, which you simply clicked on to jump from one paper to another.
The internet has always relied on them to provide meaning and context to otherwise unconnected content. The connection of content (hence “The World Wide Web“) is a fundamental part of Internet.
Erick Schonfield elaborates:
Posner never squares his position with freedom of speech or fair use rights. He doesn’t even mention them. Yet those are precisely the rights which allow me to paraphrase his argument without his permission so that I can disagree with it. Posner is more concerned with the “free rider” problem. You know, all of those “vampires” and “parasites” supposedly sucking the life out of newspapers by quoting from them or linking to their stories. Blogs and other sites just take content from newspapers, Posner asserts, but they share none of the costs of news gathering. Of course, that blanket assertion is simply not true. A growing number of blogs, including TechCrunch, do their own news gathering and send writers to cover events at their own cost. But even if we limit the discussion to cut-and-paste sites, the free rider argument still doesn’t hold much water. You can’t be a free rider if you are giving something back of value. A link on its own is valuable.
The idea that newspapers are the only ones with original content and reporting is an outdated and absurd notion. Much of the best content that I read does not come from the bigger newspapers, but the smaller writers.
Hopefully Mr. Posner’s views aren’t common among the nation’s elected officials, who could pass a law like the one outlined in his post. It would stymie the potential of the internet — while neglecting the foundations it was built upon in the process.