Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.
No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal minds of our time. Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better. Yet in a blog post last week on the future of newspapers, he concludes there may be only one way to save the industry:
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 . . .
Let me repeat that. He wants to “bar linking” to newspaper articles or any copyrighted material without the “copyright holder’s consent.” I am sorry Judge Posner, but I don’t need to ask your permission to link to your blog post or to a newspaper article online. That is just the way the Web works. If newspapers don’t like it, they don’t need to be on the Web.
Much of what Posner wants to outlaw is public discourse. Why is it okay for people to talk about the day’s news in a bar or barber shop, but not online? People should be able to discuss the day’s news on the Web without fear of violating copyright law. The natural way people discuss things on the Web is by quoting and linking to the source. (Except maybe Posner, he doesn’t seem to link to much of anything in his blog posts).
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.
Where does Judge Posner think all of these newspaper sites get their readers? It is mostly through links, not direct traffic. Removing the links would obliterate the majority of the online readership for many newspapers.
Beyond that, extending copyright law to criminalize linking would cripple the entire Web. In all of these debates, newspapers are always placed somehow at the center of the Web, completely ignoring the millions of other sites out there which have nothing to do with news. Yet changes to copyright law to make linking illegal would have much wider, unintended consequences. I can’t believe I even have to explain why this is a bad idea.
(Hat tip to Jay Rosen).
You don’t even want to know what dutch politicians have come up with: Internet tax to save (commercial) newspapers. Incredible. Let the newspapers die, if they refuse to innovate. It is all about the money, as usual.
Politicians have close relationships with journalists. At least this generation of politicians do, the next wont.
Erick,
You cut Posner’s quote at the wrong place. The very next words are “might be necessary”: “Expanding copyright law … *might be necessary* to keep free riding … from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations … that news service like Reuters and the [AP] would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.” You have mischaracterized his statement by saying that he wants to bar linking and outlaw public discourse. It seems more like someone musing about a possible solution, and not overt advocacy as you have portrayed. You and I, however, do agree on one thing: Posner is wrong.
That someone of his stature would even suggest such a solution is troubling. Full quote is:
“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.”
Question #1: Who needs newspapers?
Question #2: How long do they intend to waste trees to print letters on them that are worth $ 0 the day after.
Question #3: Has that judge ever used the web at all?
The whole thing is hilarious.
But do you think the average blog guy is going to go to iraq and report on it? NYtimes etc pays for reporters. Then the blog links to tat story but when the actually source goes away (ie newspapers), then that content goes away.
So the guy can go to Iraq and write about it in a newspaper but can’t go to Iraq and write about it online?
Newspapers…. papers… shouldn’t it be Newsonline? Or Newsmonitor?
my dear urban, this whole thing is not hilarious, it needs deep thinking and innovations. it is for sure that old rules will not be doing needful anymore!!!!
Ans 1 : Every one of us need credible news and analysis. Afa plateform is concerned, newspaper is most convenient.
Ans 2 : newspapers are not worth 0 the day after. One can use them as per ones requirement or convenience.
Ans 3 : U know news gathering is very costly and delivering it credibly even more.
I think you may be misreading this somewhat. My impression is not that he’s suggesting copyright change, but that if things continue as they are, it may be the only way to have significant sources of independent general news — other than a couple of wire services — available for society. To me it sounds not like prescription so much as pessimistic and unhappy prediction. Frankly, I find even more alarming the lack of business common sense that drives people to claim that “links will bring traffic and money enough.” And those who think that the giant Internet watercooler will easily provide news without anyone having to shell out anything are naive as to what it takes to research and write something.
I agree with you Eric, that Posner is presenting this mostly as a diagnosis rather than a prescription; however, I wouldn’t go as far as you do to say that Posner does not consider his suggestion viable.
What troubles Posner is a question that deserves serious consideration. We live in a market economy. What should we do as a society if, as seems to be the case today, the market decides it no longer values serious journalism enough to pay for it? If we accept the market’s verdict, the public will become more poorly informed and would perhaps make poorer decisions as a result. Another result might be that quality information would increasingly become the exclusive property of the elite, who have direct access to the newsmaking circles. Both possibilities would have deleterious effect on our nation’s democracy.
The alternative is to publicly subsidize journalism for the purpose of educating the public. The suggestion is not that outlandish; how different is it from public education? The difficulty with this approach is that a free press cannot be supported by the government. Therefore, the government cannot support the newspapers directly. However, a free press could be maintained if the government subsidized the press through legislation that protected the press from the encroachment of online news sources
I am not suggesting that we take Posner’s suggestion; however, I do understand from where he comes. His suggestion assumes that the market will not find another way to pay for hard-nosed journalism. I am not sure if that is the case. But if it is the case, our society faces a serious question.
I should say, I liked your article Erick.
Posner doesn’t seem to understand that online newspapers can already prevent outsiders from linking to their articles – all they need to do is check REFERER variables, and reject requests that aren’t from other pages on their sites. That doesn’t prevent cut&paste, of course, or retyping or paraphrasing stories, but it’s way simple, and most of the “deep linking” court cases have gotten it wrong because they’ve been ignorant of the technology.
I read his blog and I second this comment.
Citation please… That’s one I’d like to read more about.
Don’t you remember that you can’t link to his posts? It’s against copyright law!
Paper is acceptable if I printed it
Agreed! Wow, what an article.
Why are we trying to bail out industries that don’t work anymore? Where is the “capitalist” economy we live in? If something fails, let it die. If it’s failing, it’s because it deserves to.
“Where does Judge Posner think all of these newspaper sites get their readers? It is mostly through links, not direct traffic. Removing the links would obliterate the majority of the online readership for many newspapers.”
Oh crap, I’m quoting you… LOCK ME UP, I dare you.
I do have a comment about this quote though, RIGHT ON! That is exactly what blogs and other news aggregators do. They provide traffic to those newspaper websites with… LINKS!
Outlaw links and you are for sure dooming the newspaper industry. How did this guy NOT think about that?
I’m getting pretty irritated at our law makers these days.
This idea is completely absurd.
Case closed. NEXT-
So your saying me going to the new times website and tweeting, digging or stumbling it would be against the law? When smart people get stupid..
http://www.nytimes.com omfg! I just broke the law! http://www.nytimes.com ! oh I did it again! Someone arrest me quickly! http://www.nytimes.com oh no someone stop me before someone gets hurt!! http://www.nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com
Somehow i suspect that that kind of linking would be acceptable, but not the kind that goes directly to a specific article.
Even more “offensive” is the google news style, where the start of the article and maybe even a image have been copied…
I’ve often thought the idea was for web sites to adopt a model from programming, and allow “public” and “private” interfaces (i.e. URLs) into a site.
External sites, search engines, etc. can only invoke a different web site via the “public” interfaces/URLs specified by the site. Access to “private” interfaces would be blocked by the web server from external references.
Back in the dot com boom sites tried to do this but most of them went bankrupt. If you visit the first page you can visit the pages it links to. This sandbox is hard to maintain and basically just pisses off your users when all of a sudden people cant get to the pages they bookmarked or linked. All of a sudden your site is a walled garden that has a big do not enter sign.
Newspapers suck anway. Why don’t they add value to the consumer by adding links and media related to stories. If some blogger can copy the article, add video, pictures and links to related content then newspapers are going to be doomed if they cant match what anyone with a wysiwyg editor can do.
This does feel a lot like the music industry not wanting to change.. this is a culture of fear.. those who do not want the world to change holding on to the way it was…
Look at the bright side. I’ll be able to charge everyone who links to me.
Who’s gonna link to you? You’re not a legitimate news source, with printing presses and writers and “standards.”
I totally agree with Erick here. Enforcing this law will be absolutely pointless and waste of time and resources. As long as you link and mention the original source, it should be fine. First FTC deciding to go after blogs, now this. Is USA turning into China now?
Weird – almost sounds like a joke.
I’m trying to save carburetors and ash trays in malls (the ones with white sand) – in case anyone wants to help..
Linking to copyright material… that sounds familiar; torrent sites do this.
RIAA is probably behind this, which explains why it’s full of BS.
True. I think you are right and this is just an expansion of anti-torrent model of a lawsuit into the completely different domain.
Torrents link to files hosted on people’s computers. Servers host websites. The servers are maintained by the companies that own the material, whereas the files linked by torrents do not.
What’s scary is that he knows what a “blog” is.
In some respects he is dead right: the only way for the newspaper industry to party like it’s 1988 is to totally break what Berners-Lee proposed in 1989.
I’m wondering whether he was actually serious or just looking to provoke debate. Something so obviously absurd seems calculated to provoke a response.
His proposal is probably not legal, but to plays devil advocate: If this could be enforced, we could all see if the blogs would survive on their owns, especially those who are the first one to criticize MSM.
Yes, linking and quote article is legal, and should be. But I think the blogs could admit, that sometimes this link+quote will add significant value to their article, while the original website will not benefit that much. I wouldn’t call it “sucking the blood”, but still…
There are subcultures whose members quite seriously believe such things. That fair use should be abolished; that copyrights should last forever; that they and their industry are entitled to particular profit margins and business models; that everything you read, the hardware you read it on, and the network behind, should all be subscription or pay per access; that the purpose of law is to prevent technological change from impacting them and their peers; that trade treaties are the way to sidestep an ignorant public and anti-business special interests when establishing needed intellectual property law; and on and on. There is no sense of absurdity, little understanding of technology, policy, or societal change, and much sense of entitlement.
When Sony’s CEO recently wrote nothing good had come from the internet, he wasn’t drunk. It wasn’t a flight of fancy he had never shared with colleagues. Everyone he told wasn’t just too afraid to tell him he was cracked. He, and a class of people he talks with, in business, government and law, do indeed believe such things.
If the people you work with, have dinner with, go to conferences with, write the newsletters you read, all believe something, then it’s not absurd. Regardless of what it is. “You are an intelligent, educated person – so how can you believe THAT?” is fallacy. In the absence of institutional checks or other disincentives, many will simply go with the views of their wealthy and powerful peer group.
If this was bought in what would likely happen is some sites would allow their copyright content to be linked to through some sort of release.
Then the others would be forced to follow suit as those sites with no inbound links received less and less traffic.
The only way to save newspapers is to charge a monthly subscription fee. Period. The average income of a NYT reader is $80,000. I’m sure he can afford a $9/month subscription.
Its the smaller newspapers with not as much clout or reputation who will suffer the most. NYT, Washington Post, WSJ (which already charges a monthly fee) can get away with charging people for their content. Smaller newspapers can’t.
The pay per read model sounds good, but there the logistical problems are too huge to make it worthwhile.
I am already paying NYT $9.99/mo for the Kindle subscription. That’s enough.
I technically can “afford” $9/mo, the question is if I am willing to pay that to access just one source of information. I scan many website daily, and NYT takes about 2% of my reading time. So why to pay just NYT?
The potential problem there is that one already is paying to access the internet. So why should one pay extra to access something that’s on the internet?
@Puranjay – June 28th, 2009 at 1:00 am PDT said “The only way to save newspapers is to charge a monthly subscription fee. Period. The average income of a NYT reader is $80,000. I’m sure he can afford a $9/month subscription…”
I don’t know about the NY Times, but the SF Chronicle home delivery subscription price is between $300-$400 yearly! That is nearly as much as my internet connection costs – and I get a whole lot more info from the net than I ever did from the newspaper. Which is why I no longer subscribe to the newspaper.
What a naive idea.
The problem isn’t links. Newspaper-style news formats are outdated. They had their heyday, but didn’t translate from print to online.
Why? Because the way we find, digest and consume news has fundamentally changed. The case studies around Iran and Michael Jackson are prime examples. The Internet is a giant watercooler, where information passes more quickly than any news/editing/fact checking process can keep up.
At the same time, the demand for credible, authentic news is higher than ever. Sure, everyone went to TMZ to see that they reported MJ’s death, but then wanted confirmation, details, analysis, updates etc.. Same with Iran – we went to twitter to get the direct updates, and then loudly demanded attention from CNN.
In the next 5 years, more traditional news outlets than we’ll be able to count will go out of business. It will be sad. It will be nostalgic.
But from the ashes, a new news industry will (is) emerge(ing). All the answers, heck even all the questions, aren’t yet clear. But it’ll shake out and cycle back. The Internet is a perfect medium for the dissemination of news, and people want credible, thoughtful news. There is a business model here.
Okay, that’s the best I can do at 1 a.m.
This is very true. The newsmedia is in trouble because they can’t innovate, and they can’t leverage what they’re good at.
20 years ago, it may have been enough to re-broadcast information across the country. A bystander and a reporter saw the same thing, but the reporter got it on TVs/newspapers everywhere. If someone saw it on CBS and then wanted to relay the (uncopyrightable) facts to others, he’s limited to running up and down the streets.
Today, if a bystander and a reporter see the same thing, said bystander(s) are blogging about it, or tipping off TMZ/HuffPo, at the same time the reporter is getting on TV/newspaper/newyorktimes.com. Relaying facts is also quite simple and can reach everyone, everywhere. Broadcasting is now a trivially solved problem.
What the newspapers need to bring to the table is credibility, context, and analysis. A blog can copy the “what just happened” paragraph, but the description of the context and the analysis are too lengthy and meaty to copy. If your newspaper article can be summed up by “X just happened, according to Y”, then you fail at journalism. A blog can copy that (facts are uncopyrightable), but they can’t copy the part where you say “This is why X happened, and here’s what X likely means, and here’s why it’s good and here’s why it’s bad”.
Problem is that news have become very much a gossip collection rather then deep investigative work.
The former sells papers with nice profits, the latter may well be a economic gamble if the journalist(s) turn up nothing.
We humans have become all to focused on the short term gain of wealth…
“Newspaper-style news formats are outdated. They had their heyday, but didn’t translate from print to online.”
This just isn’t true. Newspapers may be losing money, but it isn’t because of twitter. My god, do you have any idea just how many people read/watch/listen to the news, and what a miniscule population the people who use twitter make up next to that? (Bearing in mind the huge number of ‘users’ of twitter who don’t, you know, actually use it).
It’s ridiculous and actually quite egotistical to assume that the changes you’ve made in your reading habits are reflected in everyone else’s. I read techcrunch because the writers often do good journalism. I read the papers for the same reason. Blogs are often very good, but it depends on the writer (just as with the papers).
Sure, twitter is great for finding stuff out instantly. That’s great. But it doesn’t teach you anything. You don’t learn from twitter. You don’t learn the different sides of the story. You don’t get the nuances. You don’t get the complexities and the bigger picture. This is what newspapers are great at. A story spread out over pages and pages and pages.
If all you want from news is the latest information, the simplest possible rendering of what’s happened, then twitter is for you. I’m glad it’s there. It’s great at that.
If you want to actually learn something of substance, you’re better off with people who’ve devoted their professional lives to the contexts of the stories you’ve just noticed.
I’m actually quite hopeful about the future of news, just because of this. Newspapers of quality will realize that this is their only hope of survival, and even though you aren’t interested in anything but making sure five minutes passes before you get a tidbit of information, there are plenty of us who are willing to pay for the ‘traditional’ outlets to produce something worthwhile.
“making sure *less than* five minutes passes”, I meant.
Chris – I actually think we agree more than you think
I agree that news itself, in article format written by journalists, is still very high demand.
But the newspaper format is dead. While I’m not arrogant enough to presume that *my* way of consuming news is the same as yours, I still think the overall behavior has changed.
Most people don’t walk to the end of their driveway, or to the corner store, to get their a single newspaper anymore. They don’t sit down, open it up, and flip pages and pages of general news as they skim headlines and stories, and then forget about news until that evening broadcast.
Nor do they rely on newspapers for classifieds, coupons, horoscopes etc.
Instead, most people today sit down and read the news online, in bits and pieces throughout the day. They probably have one or two core general news sites they start with. That’s as close to the old newspaper model as we get. From there, they probably link to many other sites based on headlines that caught their eye. That’s akin to someone opening up the NYTimes and seeing a headline, and then People Magazine drops out of the sky for the story! The wide range of news available to a single person from a single device is revolutionary. The monopoly on information, either by geography or access, is simply broken.
And that’s just the beginning. People find and share news through many many ways never before available (I used Twitter as an example, but people are also using RSS, Digg, newsletters, aggregator sites like Drudge and Techmeme etc, Facebook, IM, and even good-old-fashioned email.)
I stand by my assertion that the old newspaper model does not translate online. I also stand by my assertion that news, reported by trained journalists with an emphasis on fact and detail, is still in very high demand, and that we’re in the middle of a new evolution that is nothing to fear, but embrace.
Like you said, the result will likely be higher quality reporting, which is great no matter how you look at it.
The problem is that people want higher quality reporting, but they want it to agree with them (otherwise it can’t be high quality) and they want free access. That’s different from having value for it. Somehow, the maybe dozen to 15 hours (and sometimes far more) involved in writing and editing even a moderately long story heavy with information put into context has to be paid for. Sharing news is fine, but eventually someone has to pay for putting things together. But online ad rates aren’t generally high enough to support what is necessary to do this, other than perhaps specialized areas that can be done more easily at a desk by phone. But if you need shoes to hit the pavement, the cost goes up unbelievably. And many people say it should all be freely available. The logical conclusion is that the bulk of traditional news publishers will go out of business, other than perhaps a couple of wire services, and the desire for high quality reporting will largely be stymied. And although I see good coverage in vertical industries, I’ve yet to see something with the broad interests and capabilities of a traditional news office.
Excellent point! The question is not how to save the print newspaper. The question really is how to save the news industry.
With leaders like CNN selling headline T-shirts, I think the answer is already being formed.
Great article, and even better discussion!
The wagon wheel producers of the late 1800’s and the newspapers of today are in the same boat. The failed to realize their industry was transportation and news reporting! Not wagon wheels and newspapers! There was a time for both wagon wheels and newspapers and then they became a thing of the past as Firestone started to produce rubber tires and newspapers are becoming a thing of past, with the internet and technology. Change or get left behind wonering what happened!!
It’d be interesting if somehow, everyone on the web could be convinced to not link to newspaper sites for a month. It’d be interesting to see if the newspapers changed their tune. Poor folks, don’t realize that the web distribution that’s being handed to them for free is probably a lifeline more than anything else.
This is a crucial point. For all people complain about blogs and sites like reddit/digg “free-riding”, what they don’t realize is that those sites provide users and content providers with a crucial service – they direct users to the content they want to see.
It’s not possible for me to read the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today every day, and still get anything done. So even if I superficially scan them, there are likely to be gems in there that I miss (and thus pageviews and ad impressions they miss out on). If a blog/aggregator links to an article or opinion piece that sounds interesting, I’m gonna click-through and read the piece on the newspaper’s website.
If blogs and aggregators didn’t exist, I wouldn’t read more newspapers, I’d read less.
Mr. Schonfeld,
You completely mis-read the article. Further, you took the quote out of context. Posner is suggesting that, perhaps, ONE reason newspapers are suffering is that it is easy for free-riders to grab the news instantaneously, re-post it on their site, and make money. So basically, freeriders.com can make money off the New York Times, and the New York Times gets nothing (except for a hyperlink if they’re lucky).
Posner’s concern, is, how can we ensure access to timely, and truthful information, if the Press is being sucked dry? This sounds like a valid concern. You fail to address this central concern in your post.
The closest you come is to stating that contrary to Posner’s “blanket statement” that most blogs don’t produce their own content, a “growing number” (how many?) do. You fail to recognize that these blogs that are producing their own content, are proto-newspapers. They will soon face (if not already facing) the same problem that the established players are facing.
Also, Mr. Schonfeld, when he is speaking of blogs, he clearly isn’t talking about blogs that produce their own content, much like this great blog does. So please, respect the reader’s intellect.
I’m surprised Mr. Arrington let you post such a meandering and misguided blog post.
m
Of course there is a way. And it’s on the search engine side. Search engine CAN discover duplicates and prioritize the results according to the REAL time-stamp of a material. It would require a REAL time-stamp though… hehe.
I don’t think you get the internet either. The way google find’s information is through links from other websites and internally. Twitter on the other hand has users report on a low level to a twitter server. That is why you can tweet something and have it just appear. There will never be real time google. I am not being blind. I understand the process and google has better things to do then try to get the whole internet to report to it.
> how can we ensure access to timely, and truthful
> information, if the Press is being sucked dry?
Well, killing the Press will improve quality and truthfulness of information by reducing amount of propaganda being pushed as objective “news”. At least nobody has illusions that people on the Internet are biased – and one does have access to a much wider range of opinions, without the control of those who own the Press.
Looks like the newspaper industry is all scared because of the web. I remember there was a time when I used to wait for the newspaper early morning. Not anymore. I get all my news online. And the people reading newspaper online is going to increase in the years to come.
The newspaper guys had too much of power with them. I’m glad its decreasing now. They’ve got competition.
And about Richard Posner, STOP DREAMING! This is not gonna happen!
Some of the stupidity involved is jaw dropping.
1.) Newspapers solved a problem that is no longer a problem anymore: In a world where the cost of information distribution is high, they assumed the massive distribution costs. This is no longer a problem.
2.) Newspapers benefitted from natural monopolies caused by geography: Every city had a publication that duplicated the efforts of other publication in other cities and did not have to worry about any direct competition because of the natural barriers to distribution.
3.) As an accident of limited media options, Newspapers enjoyed high revenue with large margins on print advertising. Due to a disruptive technology called the Internet, the beneficial circumstances of 1.) and 2.) above have been completely obliterated, destroying their business model’s value that made condition 3.) possible.
WOW! Chris, you are spot on here! Thank you for laying it out so eloquently!
Regards.
I’ll add a (4), if I may be so bold.
4) Newspapers enjoyed an asymmetry of information pre-Internet. 15 years ago, there were no easy sources of contextual information. If the Iran election situation happened 15 years ago, the only way we’d find out whether statisticians distrusted the precinct-level voting information would be if a major newspaper asked one to investigate it, or republished one’s findings. The only way we’d know about the history of the major players in Iran would be if a newspaper/newsmagazine (or TV network) published an “explainer” thereof. Today, dozens of statisticians’ comments on the voting irregularities are trivially findable via Google, and it’s easy to learn the backgrounds of key players via Wikipedia.
+1
Look at this ad on TechCrunch. Looks inappropriate to me.
http://i41.tiny...com/24vs40j.jpg
Is it April Fool’s Day already?
Great post — you should mentor Siegler.
Two quick points.
1) If you don’t want people deep-linking to your stories, configure your .htaccess to refuse connections without the proper referrer.
2) Copy & Paste “blogging” is an annoyance to smaller bloggers & a danger to people trying to make money. I’ve had my artcles copied verbatim to some high traffic sites – they’ve made a tonne of advertising revenue from me & cost me bandwidth (they linked to my high res photos). What do I get out of it? Nothing.
The only answer that I can see is a generic payment model. Imagine that you pay, say, €10 per month to an agency. Every month, your ISP tallies up which sites you’ve visited & how often. Those sites registered with the agency get a cut of your cash.
Obviously it needs a bit of work to make it safe, secure & fair – and it still doesn’t address the problem of C&P “blogging”.
T
Do you realize how much abuse it would cause? Right now we have ‘clickers’ who click Google ads for certain unscrupulous entities, if your dream would become true – the owners of botnets would jump up to the ceiling in joy, they would start making REAL money (a couple of orders of magnitude more) for a site with one page and a huge (10Mbyte picture on it)… and they would receive this money from the ISP’s directly.
Would be fun to watch. 
“Copy and paste blogging” is already illegal. There exist legal remedies for it (DMCA, primarily), which likely need to be made easier for average people to use, but which do exist.
That said, you’re completely right on (1) – we need to explore technical solutions before we explore legal solutions. We need to explore narrow solutions (affecting a handful of sites) before we explore broad solutions (rewriting copyright law).
I wonder how this guy (Posner) can be called as a Great legal mind..??
2 possible outcomes:
The Internet becomes truly free, no rules applied, no anti-piracy laws etc.
OR
The Internet becomes the same as in China…
Your comment validates my point. You can read it above.
Both scenarios are equally unlikely.
Here in the Netherlands we have also discussions about saving the Dutch newspapers. A lot of them are already in hands of a Belgium news company (so what dutch newspapers?)
How to save the newspapers and the neutrality of the information sources. A week ago a commission (with former minister as chairman) launched a report that we dutchies should pay 3 of 4 euros on our internet account each mounth to save the newspapers. On fore hand the present minister says not to consent with it. As getting to be the most controlled Big Brother state on the european hemisphere, i would say, why should we pay for our imprisonment.
Ivan
then the US CTO jumps up and kicks that fool in the mouth and all was good again… sanity restored
I think the judge is right, though he phrases his argument badly.
‘Linking’ as such is not what is at issue. It is profiting by distributing others’ work in competition with the original source (a la Google News, which hosts articles taken from other sites, then sells its own ads against it).
Links add value if they are in the context of a debate proceeding from the content. But it’s specious to say all links add value, or are just the same as chatting about the news in the barbershop, if they are only a token gesture for profiting from someone else’s intellectual property.
Not all links add value, but most do. Google News is a fine example. It matches people wanting information with sites providing information. If I want to find out about what’s going on in Iran, I could check a dozen websites, and see if there’s an article I want to read, or I can search “Iran” on Google News, and get those articles delivered to me as search results, without having to dig through newspaper-websites’ navigation. While Google News provides me with no additional context, information, or debate, it does provide value to me and to NYT.com.
Forget hyperlinks, the judge wants to ban PARAPHRASING?! How would anyone enforce that?
i would have thought linking would be pretty good for newspaper websites. I mean i would never read a judges blog, but i was seriously tempted to read this one. and with more interesting stories, where people want to really get in
i would have thought linking would be pretty good for newspaper websites. I mean i would never read a judges blog, but i was seriously tempted to read this one. and with more interesting stories, where people want to really get in depth coverage they are surely going to go to the source of the story that the blog is linked to?
i dont understand why it is so hard for newspapers to make money, well i suppose i can understand the problem with physical newspapers, but newsites could follow to extremely simple pieces of advice. firstly make your writers work to commision or at least a basic wage + commision. that way you cut your direct costs and only pay your employees for stories that get lots of readers (and as such advertising!) The other thing to do is jump on the twitter bandwagon and create an app that delivers their latest stories to people that have become their followers. Using that method people will be able to choose the news that interests them and the news sites will be able to target advertising for more accurately which will make them far more advertising money than without that level of targetting.
doesnt sound that complicated to me
“I mean i would never read a judges blog, but i was seriously tempted to read this one”
It works great like that for non-major sites. I would have never thought to look at Judge Posner’s blog normally either. However, this doesn’t work as well for sites which are established news-gathering brands (NYT, WashPost, AP, MSNBC, etc.)
“only pay your employees for stories that get lots of readers (and as such advertising!)”
One of the crucial goals of any attempt to “save” the journalism industry has to make sure that “what will get me ad dollars” is not more important than “what is ‘important’ to cover”. Regardless of who’s making money, a journalism industry cannot prioritize “Teen Celebrity Racy Photo Scandal” or “White Girl Kidnapping/Murder of the Week” over “Iranian Elections Stolen”. Journalism has a number of positive externalities, including a better educated populace and a better culture. If any “economic engineering” is to occur in journalism, we need to make sure that the goal is maximizing these externalities, not maximizing money-making.
Alright, firstly it does seem like you’ve slightly mis-represented the judges point, but the essence remains that he believes changing the copyright law regarding linking may be a partial solution to newspapers current problems. And I think pretty much everyone on here has agreed that for various reasons, that’s a pretty stupid solution.
I for one wonder at the lack of regard for how the web works, links, authorised or otherwise, being the main way of reaching a site to begin with, and one of main ways Google etc use to determine where to place a site in it’s search listings. As far as I can figure if we stop linking to NYT or whoever then they no longer appear near the top of search listings, nobody comes to their site from elsewhere, and nobody can ever find their articles. Surely that is substantially more detrimental to their business than anything else.
Newspapers clearly do have a problem, but they need to embrace new technology rather than trying to block it (similar to the music industry.) If they can consistently produce high quality content, in a fact based and timely fashion, then I will bookmark their site and return regularly to see what’s happening, regardless of how many other people are linking to them, quoting them, or wholesale ripping them off. The quality of content is the key here, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the only thing that could save them.
Erick,
Do you have data to back up the assertion that most traffic to newspaper sites comes from referring links?
Interesting way to kill the US newspaper industry. We Brits, of course, would never do anything so stupid.
http://www.davi...egraphcouk.html
What? He’s just making decisions based on ‘Empathy’. He ‘feels’ for the newspapers.
What’s wrong with that?
LOL, what a pompous moron! Sounds like this idiot needs to get a hobby!
RT
http://www.complete-privacy.tk
…and while the idiots are at it they can pass a law, forcing people to get the news from newspapers, or force blogs to register with the “news police”, ban 24-hour news networks…ban twitter or simply use your taxes to support the news media.
Seriously newspapers can stop search engine linking right now by setting up a “robots.txt” file (5 minutes work). If they want to stop ALL incoming links they can build their pages in flash.
As for solutions…there might not be any. Paper news is obsolete and old fashioned news gathering simply not competitive.
Why save the Newspapers?
[quoting] linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed [end quoting]
This is all stupid and just an utopy!
If newspapers want to protect their copyrighted content, let them not publish it online and block all sites & APIs to grab that content ! This way, the few ones(!) who still want those news will buy the hard copy at the nearby press-shop.
And by the way, why should one strive to save a product which is obiviously not “consumed” any more? If the industry is not able to find a way out of it, let it die, or reduce in size until it will “fit” in the new shoes. Journalists do not necesarily need to work for big newspaper corporations, they can very well manage to survive on their own – and ways to monetise a good blog, are enough
Those old corporate guys really fail to understand that they have long entered a new era, where finally the power of information and the spreading of information is with the little man and not with the big corporations.
By the way, to all those newspapers and journalists wanting to link to this, I want my money! My comment is copyrighted! OK?
What an idiot! What is with these dumbasses? How about to save newspapers they should have changed their business model and execution in 1998 so they wouldn’t be where they are today.
At this point nothing will save newspapers! Nothing!
They are really aren’t worth saving anyway. Let it go! Let it go!
What is really scaring me is that this guy is a judge.
If Posner and his generation thinks losing newspapers is bad. He probably thinks losing GM is just as unthinkable. Well Posner hang on this going to be a bumpy ride. Posner you are about to see everything you grew up with disappear.
And for us Gen Y/Millennial’s things are going to get a bit rough over the next 10 years. Guys like Posner are going to try and block progress.
I was impassioned to leave this comment on Posner’s blog. In case any one is interested:
Dear Mr. Posner, I saw you speak a couple of times while at law school and found you to be a thoughtful and intellectually honest man. Your post worries me because I feel like you are acting atypically in taking a very strong stance on this subject with little knowledge about the subject matter and with heavy biases towards the status quo merely because they are already enfranchised and established entities. I hope that you will re-consider your thoughts and continue to do research on the subject.
This is an example: I came to this post via a link on a techcrunch article after reading a paraphrased version of your thoughts on techcrunch. My presence (and others who are doing likewise) adds value to your site: a) if you had advertisements here people like me would click them, b) your reputation, your blog’s brand, and the memory of your arguments increases and becomes more popular with me and people I share you with, c) my comment actually adds value to you (increases likelihood of more visitors via search or links, and it also potentially helps achieve the goal of many blogs by challenging your opinions and making them more well-founded).
Online traditional news sources (like nytimes.com) do everything they can to get people to link to their content. To people who make a business on the web, links are described as “the currency of the web” and actually proprietize your content and extend its value across the web as opposed to devaluing it. Look into the SEO industry, look into back-linking, there is a huge amount of information here that you should learn about before taking a stance as strong as you have about repealing fair use and standard practices in a new technology that actually greatly increases social value by its ability to take advantage of zero marginal costs.
Sure the internet is a disruptive technology, and maybe perennial giants like the New York Times will have to change to survive as power is decentralized in the market to individuals via blogs and real-time news sources like twitter, but that doesn’t mean that the government should step in and arbitrarily save the most profitable embodiment of traditional organs just because they are a more centralized / organized / traditional interest group. They will survive, just in a more efficient / value-producing embodiment for society after they internalize the cost of finding this new embodiment (like every other company has to do in changing times). This shift is inevitable no matter the government safeguards that are imposed. The best way to increase the Good through changing times is to hold fast to our traditional values and to choose NOT to sacrifice them in cases of surprising new circumstances—from the Patriot Act to repealing standard copyright protections / free speech laws on the internet.
Well done. I too have a lot of respect for Posner back from my law school days. He’s not an idiot, he’s just well behind the times and needs some serious perspective.
a) if you had advertisements here people like me would click them
i have adblock, dont you?
Why make it illegal, I agree with everyone who said if it’s a good idea you can setup your web server to prevent linking. You don’t need any new laws to do that.
umm…
tom. if my crawler ignores your access file, please tell me how you as a content provider can stop me from linking, or copying your stuff????
ignorant!
Firstly, the world already has laws to prevent copying…if someone is copying your content send a take-down notice to their host.
Secondly, most popular search engines will obey your robots.txt file. If you want to prevent all incoming links this is easy:
1. Build your page in flash; or
2. Use dynamically generated expiring links (the guys that sell e-books often use this approach).
You can also delete your sitemap.xml file and make sure that you have no RSS feeds that link to your site (we wouldn’t want these links showing up on a feed reader!)
Ignorant?
From Redditor “Saiing”:
I’d be willing to bet that 90% of the people who have commented in this debate so far haven’t even bothered to read his blog post in its entirety (by which I mean the judge himself, not the blogger who quoted a small point out of a much bigger discussion of the impact of the internet on news gathering). I dare say there are even those who just came in here to comment without even bothering to check anything more than the sensationalist title (and ironically they’re usually the ones who are most vocal about calling everyone else an idiot).
While his point was somewhat misguided in regard to linking to copyrighted content, he was looking at news gathering in a much broader context and considering the cost to all of us if the papers who still fund expensive news gathering networks and offices worldwide were to disappear due to bloggers basically taking their expensively produced copy and riding on their backs for free. Essentially we’d be left with a situation where there would be one or two agencies (e.g Reuters and PA) who would have a complete duopoly over a large amount of what we read (if that isn’t already pretty close to the truth).
It’s been clear from the events in Iran that the internet can play a major part in replacing these networks, but I wonder just how long this will take, and whether the professional news gatherers don’t still have an important role to play. Sometimes I like to see the raw, subjective viewpoint from the blogger at the scene, but there are still times when I like to read my news from a professional reporter in the field.
It’s to reddit’s shame these days, that things have deteriorated to the point where everything seems to need to be reduced to some kind of stupid mocking soundbite in order to make the front page. “Judge wants to ban hypertext linking. Hahahahaha” – if that kind of karma-whoring is the best we have, then we might well laugh, although the joke is on us.
Sadly, Paul, I wish you were wrong.
The sad irony of all this is that linking has existed before the internet. Footnotes, endnotes, and other citations to reference source material in every eighth-grade english paper.
We don’t need to talk technology when talking about the linking issue.
Erick should really be talking about footnotes and endnotes if he really wants to highlight how ridiculous the anti-linking position is. The anti-linking folks want to ban footnotes and endnotes.
From experience clocking click-throughs in my own online work and doing some research on the subject, I’d say that you’re being wildly optimistic. The clickthrough rate is more likely to be in the low single digit percentages. Perhaps that’s why so many say that content should be “free” – because they don’t actually read it and depend instead on someone to read it for them. So they end up unconsciously assuming that the material will still be there, because they take the secondary transmission as the originator of the material.
There should be internet rules.
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned the alternative content licensing methods beside copyright ( Creative commons, GNU/GPL, etc. ).
Even if such a law was put in place, the content creator still gets to decide on the policies concerning its consumption.
So the law could work for those who wish to stick with strict copyright policies (i.e. our newspaper friends), and it could be easily sidestepped by others who just want to share their content freely.
Ironically though, it would totally sink the newspaper websites. No one will want to bother with them.
So maybe the judge should push to pass the law
“Much of what Posner wants to outlaw is public discourse. Why is it okay for people to talk about the day’s news in a bar or barber shop, but not online?”
Gee, you think maybe because the folks at the bar or barbershop are not selling content off of someone else’s content?
By the way, how much does TechCrunch charge for those ads over to the right?
Since when is a link content?
As a publisher of a magazine, I rely on bloggers linking to my articles on my site. The last thing I want to do is hinder the ability for bloggers to do this. Sure I am against complete violation of my copyright by copy and pasting the entire article, however it’s clear the mind of someone who doesn’t understand the value of bloggers and their ability to drive traffic and interest in newspapers and magazine web sites.
dumbest idea ever. where do these people come from?
Not a joke :
If you read French, read this : http://www.hald...ns-legales.html
If you don’t : this is the official site of the French “High Authority for the Struggle Against Discrimination and for Equality”. The ones in charge of fighting racism. By the governement.
According to the site’s using condition, I cannot create an hyperlink without written authorization. Yes, I just broke their reglementation!
This is a stupid idea because it will absolutely kill readership. How can you find anything on the web? From a technical standpoint, you can’t possibly put every interesting article on the front page page. It’s not feasible and it will be a giant mess. News that I care about won’t be the same news you care about.
No one will be able to read any article except for the ones highlighted by the editors on the front page. This is dangerous because it’ll lead to a nation of under-informed masses being fed biased news. Mainstream [US] coverage of news is horrible and narrow-minded.
> This is dangerous because it’ll lead to a nation of
> under-informed masses being fed biased news.
> Mainstream [US] coverage of news is horrible and
> narrow-minded.
Perhaps this is precisely what Posner and his ilk want.
How about the newspapers just rebuild their site with frames. Then no urls to link to, problem solved under the judges proposal.
XSights – a company based in Israel has developed a solution to transform static media to dynamic and interactive one (http://dipeshkh...nteractive-one/).
There will be more innovation in this front and that will help to save tradition of reading newspaper.
Here’s a video segment where Jim Lehrer (PBS News Hour) proposed that journalists could contribute news, photos, videos to a central pool where it could be purchased by any media source.
http://fora.tv/...ious_Journalism
This just in: Major movie studios are “fed up” with movie reviewers and movie show time databases acting as “vampires” on their valuable content. From now on, there shall be no notices or reviews of movies coming out, and no publishing of show times to allow people to go see a movie… That will teach all those review sites…