You will love this. And I quote:
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.
If you read the whole thing on the dead tree apocalypse, you might read through this paragraph without thinking. But look at it again. Bar linking to or paraphrasing. The judge has a frakking blog, you’d think that gives him some understanding of how the internet works hell, you’d think he knows how fair use works. I mean, you want to save an obsolete business model by outlawing the core functionality of HTML? MMMMM’kay. If you do that, how does he expect anyone to end up on the on-line walled garden of the NY Times? Oh, right, this is about the perpetuation of dead trees, not allowing the N.Y. Times (or anyone else) to actually profit from the new media to pay for their journalists.
This idea is made of FAIL.
3 Comments
ryan · July 4, 2009 at 4:04 pm
If you made money in internet stocks or IT stocks, you made money from copyright violation and pornography. the strongest selling points of all those PCs, operating systems, hardware, and Internet connections were….pornography, downloading music without paying for it, watching videos online, gambling, and “file sharing”.
posting links is one thing. links to material gathered by professionals, edited by professionals, and printed/posted by professionals is another. the print media business model subsidizes internet content. Copy-and-paste does not work as a business model, or something that produces good journalism for long.
S Andrew Swann · July 5, 2009 at 12:38 pm
“posting links is one thing. links to material gathered by professionals, edited by professionals, and printed/posted by professionals is another.”
You do understand that more than half the traffic to any site is driven by links from other sites? This is in fact a major method of scoring on Google. By implementing this, you would actually punish these venues by insuring that the only eyeballs that would EVER go to a newspaper’s website are those who go directly to the site from within a browser, and you would also insure that anything over a few days old would vanish from the face of the web.
You (and the proposal’s author) seem to misunderstand that the fact people blog and link back to news drives traffic back to the site the content comes from, thus increasing hits and ad revenue.
ryan Costa · July 5, 2009 at 9:27 pm
the “content” most often comes from the print business model operations. the official websites of these newspapers or newsmagazines is welcome to collect whatever revenue they can connive from visits to their websites.
maybe print is a dying medium. I am convinced the quality and standards of mainstream online reporting will continue to decline. nothing we can do about it but get hit by it. the future looks increasingly absurd and desperate.
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