Slashdot Mirror
NPR Reconsiders Linking Policy
jfruhlinger writes: "Slashdot wasn't the only site I saw that commented on NPR's stupid linking policy, but I'm sure it generated a lot of traffic and comments to NPR's site. Now NPR has issued a statement that they are reconsidering that policy. The statement goes into the reasons why the original policy was established -- it looks like it was an overkill response to a legitimate problem. It concludes with the encouraging statement that 'NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR.'"
Actually, I saw a far more hubaloo on the blogs than I did on Slashdot. And I'd hazard a guess that there were many more links (or readers, if you lean that way) to the original BoingBoing post than there were to the Slashdot story.
"'d say that NPR is committing patent infringement every time they use a hyperlink! [slashdot.org]
This all sounds pretty stupid to me, agreed... but who listens to NPR anyway?"
Outside the very large markets, not many. I've seen the raw Arbitron numbers for my area, and NPR, despite being on THREEE 50,000 watt radio stations gets fewer listeners than one of the religious AM daytimers...
If you hate Clear Channel, for it's practice of using out of market voicetracking and satellite automation, you have to hate NPR, the SINGLE LARGEST satellite automation network in radio.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
NPR isn't particularily tax-supported. It receives minimal competitive grant funding ($0.000001058/US taxpayer). See this discussion board.
Setting aside your ad-hominem attack for the moment:
RealMedia servers *can* accept start parameters, but they don't *have to* accept them.