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Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal
An article at TechCrunch discusses a blog post from Richard Posner, a US Court of Appeals judge, about the struggling newspaper industry. Posner explains why he thinks the newspapers will continue to struggle, and then comes to a rather unusual conclusion: "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."
...probably the death of Slashdot?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
While this seems like an opinion that runs counter to many tenants slashdotters hold dear, I think we should at least consider it. By any measure, Posner is one of the most impressive judges on the bench today-- and in my opinion, one of the only judges that really 'get' all the issues surrounding copyright and digital things in general.
I'm hardly alone-- Lessig has noted that there isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person, and Posner was Obama's first choice when asked which sitting judge he would most like to argue before.
So you may disagree with this opinion-- I'm leaning that way too-- but it's worth fair consideration. Go and actually read his post before passing judgment. When he was guest blogging about copyright law at Lessig.org back in 2004, he noted, "I am distrustful of people who think they have confident answers to such questions." That goes for both sides in this debate.
Sort of a hack job by techcrunch actually.
Buggy manufacturers are too important an industry to lose.
Why is there such a fascination to save legacy products? I understand black and white print is important but if we applied this logic to other mediums the courts would be protecting inferior technologies like VHS.
Watch the step.
Mr. Darwin has some advice for you: evolve or die.
I'm not going to stop talking about news or current events in my own house, let alone online. I use Skype for a reason, including talking with friends about stories in the news, and that requires *GASP* LINKING to the stories, or posting snippets. Not only that, but this would effectively make all decent sources for any sort of research paper illegal to access. This legal eagle needs to take a drink from the fountain of non-stupidity.
In God we trust, all others we virus scan.
By clicking the link you create incentives for other stealing pirate swine to put up more links. And then all is lost!
While it might be the death of "Big Media", it will be the birth of "lite media" which consists of the blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook. When the incentive to compile news is financial, we will only get news that is sensational and designed to be sticky. However, when that incentive is removed, we will be able to see a rapid advance in news gathering for its own sake. Such an evolution in news gathering is a huge breakthrough for the little guy who prior to this would never have had his voice heard.
Old Media is shaking in their boots at the thought of being overrun by so-called "unqualified bloggers". Take the recent election, for example. While many people tuned in to CNN and the NY Times for information, many more relied on Little Green Footballs, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos for up to the minute election data. As more little guys enter the market, we will finally see real competition. Since competition leads to improved product, we can only expect to see better news once the corporations like NY Times and CNN wither away.
I wouldn't pay attention to this. However, he is one of the greatest minds ever to have sat on the bench. Lawrence Lessig (who clerked for him) has said "There isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person."
His scholarship is top notch and he contributes to many different areas of understanding outside of law, such as sociology, anthropology, and economics. He's a formidible intelligence.
He can be wrong but that doesn't mean we should quickly dismiss him.
If a search engine is located in another country, how do you stop it linking to your copyright material? Fines that they won't pay? Extradition? Blocking their site?
I can see how he thinks banning paraphrasing might help the newspaper industry. A huge number of high profile blogs are guilty of basically ripping the content off the original source and providing a tiny link on the bottom citing their source. I would agree that is unfair to the people that originally reported the story. The linking part makes no sense however. Reuters and the AP want people linking to content on their site, it's one of main ways they get traffic. Unless the anchor text of the link is on huge ass summary than banning linking makes no sense.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
The United States is fully capable of shooting off its own leg to save a toenail. There are men with real power in the country who would happily pull the plug on the entire Internet tomorrow if it would save their margins on Marley & Me 2.
I wanted to write that paper about the current affairs of the political system but I can't give you any sources since it's illegal to link to copyrited material...the new my dog ate my homework.
Newspapers want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the traffic that comes from Google linking to them, but they want sole access to the internet advertising revenues associated with their content.
Also, how does the judge propose helping the newspapers fend off online classified services like craigslist, which are the real threat to newspapers.
With this judgment, one of two things will happen:
1) Google stops linking to them entirely and their online business dries up.
2) All or most newspapers grant Google the right to link to and show excerpts of their stories.
Either way, the newspapers won't see a revival. Their only hope is to set up some kind of common online newspaper portal to take the place of Google news. Except, this time, there isn't the equivalent of Apple's iTunes to save them from their own stupidity.
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This really is not a problem for slashdot, we can just remove references from news postings...just formalizing what slashdot readers have been doing for years
Isn't the community consensus that every publicly accessible URL points to content that the community is free to link to and view at will?
That is: if you post a document on a web server, then you're granting the whole world the same rights to the material that you would be if you posted that material on a billboard sign next to the highway.
Why can't judges see that?
Why do some judges assume that the common understanding of a URL needs to change, rather than just having the newspapers stop supporting publicly accessible URLs to content they want protected???
It is so sad that someone who is so clueless is in such an influential position, and for life no less! Anybody else in favor of term limits for federal judgeships?
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Hey, have you been sleeping under some rock? We don't RTFAs in this part of the internet. The editors only have to insert a few phony "links" in the story to www.foo.bar
"Slashdot effect" would have to be reinterpreted as "a bunch of people arguing about something without bothering to know the story" though, but around here we take pride in doing that.
Now I will have to ask you to get off my fucking lawn.
This would be a death blow to traditional media online... Most everything anyone reads online, if this law passes, would be creative commons liscensed. I will probably never buy a news paper or other traditional print media. I imagine much of the the younger generation feels the same way. The new generation has to be told Wikipedia is not an academic resource.
Everything is copyrighted by default. Online papers might want ad revenue from clicks, but how on earth will I reach them if it's never linked anywhere(assuming I don't know their url off the top of my head)
Turn off the internet, and make it illegal to receive any news that isn't officially state mandated, state protected, state owned, and state run.
Even that won't give this judge what he wants, because people would still be able to use pencils, pens, or other mark making tools to do such things as 'paraphrase' news sources.
This judge is an idiot, and because he has power, he is a dangerous idiot. He should be removed for the safety of the American people in particular, and the safety of the internet in general.
Old man yells at cloud.
By default all material is copyrighted.
Basically it is about going back to what they are used to do in the past.
Newspapers bought their content from companies like Reuters, so they would love to continue to do so and 'own' the news. Do not forget that a newspapers, like television, now is a way of selling advertisement space. The public is not the customer, the advertisers are.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Well, boo-hoo. Nobody forced newspapers to put their content online. It sure is convenient for us readers, but if they were not prepared to deal with what is happening now, then they should just pull out and go to just print or subscription only. Let's see how well that will fare. Will they want people writing about their stories banned?
The Internet's whole point is copying and sharing information, and if you don't want to share your content or cannot afford to, then don't freaking put it there.
For people who still don't get that monopolies are always created by government coercion, here might be one fresh in the getting of yet another privilege.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Let's eliminate all linking to copyrighted material, especially material on traditional slow-to-adapt news sites. No quotations, no citing, no discovery via search engines. This should do wonders to speed their well-deserved demise.
- without destroying the net
a) everything written essentially has creator copyright
b) making a link to anything else would then be violation
- internet assumption
a) if it is on the net you can link to it
this follows from the basic structure of the net as addressable content
If someone does not want a link made they had better not put it on the internet. Putting it on the internet essentially means permission to link.
Banning links to web content is the same as banning references in off-line world, which is of course, idiotic. On the other side, caching and aggregating pages without permission from original author/publisher is a whole different matter.
I'm pretty sure that this also means the end of the Dewey Decimal system, since it links to copyrighted material.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
So the print media thinks that they'll benefit from the loss of the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising? Isn't becoming invisible the last thing you want your website to do?
That's insane but we should let them have it. Any company who understands the internet will modify their copyright license terms to circumvent this ridiculousness and any company that doesn't just has to search for referrer=anything-at-all and deny everyone from viewing their content unless they actually bookmarked or manually entered the URL in the browser.
I don't really savour the idea of the death of "real" media, central control is bad but having actual life-long students of journalism working the stories is good. If media companies decide that they won't go where the market is leading them, that's their decision.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
Judges can 'think' whatever they like. However, so can any other random citizen. If there are laws in place that make linking to Copyrighted Material illegal, then if a case comes before said judge, s/he can rule in that fashion. If that's how the law is written, of course.
Otherwise, the judge can lobby his representatives and senators just like the rest of us can.
No judge has any role beyond that of any other random citizen in enacting laws. There's this thing called separation of powers.
Providing no one ever has a new idea, the judge just might be right. In the real world however, if there is a need for an independent news service, it will pop up all on it's own. That is the nature of the internet, someone is always trying something new and when a need arises or an opportunity develops, there are 8 billion people in the world that can offer a solution. One of them is bound to have a good idea!
This may represent the modern perversion of capitalism, but schemes to prop up failed industries because of their political connections is not capitalism. Closer to socialism or really corporatism. And I can't think of many more deserving of failure than the dead tree status quo merchants.
Linking to your public ad serving website is not free riding. The fact that you can't stay in business with your model doesn't give you the right to look toward those that are successful to fund your failure. That ain't capitalism for sure.
P.S. The captcha word for this post is dinosaur.
The one thing that is completely missed by the judge is that the death of corporate news is a Good Thing! (tm) Big companies and the people who pay them off and/or own them have been telling us "what is going on" for far too long. As the big news wires die off they will be replaced by a much more difficult to control/exploit wiki-type news reported/edited by people who were there and don't have some corporate/political axe to grind. News is dead. Long live the news. jp
In the quote, the only real "WTF" part is the mention of hyperlinks. It's unrelated to the concept being discussed, and it is obviously false that a hyperlink from site A to site B represents any cost (let alone unpaid) to site B. Rather, it is an almost unilateral gift from site A to site B.
Naturally, I also disagree about the main concept, which essentially calls Fair Use economically untenable. But that is an actual matter for debate, rather than the hyperlink stuff, which is self-evidently contradictory. From looking at Posner's works and credentials, I'd be hesitant to label him "stupid about technology". Maybe it was just a verbal slip?
This would destroy the entire web. Every single link in existence is a link to copyrighted material.
This sounds like yet another plan that will create bureaucracy where none is needed. All in an attempt to inflate budgets and get more money (like so, so many government plans).
It's worth noting the rise of Government-sponsored news sources. Until a few years ago, few in the US paid any attention to what the Voice of America put out. Now, it's a widely aggregated news source, because it's free. Google News aggregates the BBC, Xinhua, and Al-Jazeera, all of which are Government-controlled. (The BBC and Al-Jazeera have some independence, but it's limited. Xinhua is the official output of the Chinese government.)
From the private sector, there's an endless supply of self-serving material, some of which gets picked up as "news". Google News sometimes thinks PR Newswire is a valid news source.
The independent sources remaining tend to be aimed at people with serious money. The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Bloomberg are still quite good, and are profitable. Mass market print journalism, though, is dying. The proud boasts in newspaper banners ring hollow today. The San Francisco Examiner still says "Monarch of the Dailies" at the top of page one, but that was a long, long time ago. San Francisco's mayor recently remarked that if the SF Chronicle stopped publishing its print edition, no one under 35 would notice.
Newspaper vending machines seem to be mostly empty now; it's not even worth filling them. Locally, I've seen some stickered with abandoned-car like notices from the city, which tell the newspaper "fill it with papers or we tow it away".
That doesn't make any sense. One has nothing to do with the other:
See? Different things.
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
It's a horrible point, and we don't want to deal with the consequences if he decides to interpret law based on his point, but that doesn't mean it isn't *TRUE*. Remember that. The internet is killing newspapers, and it wouldn't be killing them as fast if draconian laws were keeping Fark and Slashdot from existing.
This reminds me of the only sane answer to the piracy whining of the music industry: Don't want people copying and distributing your music? Don't produce music! Problem solved. (Or find other ways to profit from people marketing and distributing your stuff without requiring money for it -- there *must* be ways to profit from people working for nothing.)
No, really. As long as the only answer to individual people complaining about abuse of data they publish on facebook (or whereever) seems to be "don't publish things you don't want others to know" this is the only answer you can give Big Content likewise.
well fuck them anyhow.
While there may be a credible argument that internet via craigslist, et al, have been eating away at newspaper revenue, this claim that deep linking is a big problem I think is really absurd. If anything, deep linking, improves advertiser exposure as users click on a link to be transported to a newspapers website. The benefit and ad exposure to the newspaper is quite the same as if the user had entered the article from the newspapers own main index page. This just seems to be an Orwellian attempt to censor the internet and expand tyranical powers. If a newspaper were really concerned about the financial issues, maybe they should provide some premium online subscription option and password protect their content. THe idea of banning linking is totally unnecessary, since the newspapers if they wished could password protect, and in fact, unconstitutional violation of free speech, similar to banning citations in written material.
I would also suggest that, a solution best for all users is allow for an alliance or cooperative of newspapers nationally, a recipricol agreement between them that when one purchases a subscription to the local newspaper, they also get access to other newspapers around the country as well. This preserves the benefits of the internet to be able to access information easily coming from everywhere, and makes it affordable, given the thousands of news sources, its impossible to subscribe to each one. There can be 'low income' and 'consumer' plans which are targeted at the affordability in the consumer market.
Wouldn't this sort of thing discourage people from using things like Wikileaks to disclose sensitive information? Although I could see the argument for piracy, I think such a policy has the potential for being used in other ways that would ultimately hurt more then just pirates.
The main thing to do next is to patent stories. You see... someone can still creatively paraphrase or just re-write the story! We should stop the theft of news! Really news is creative...look at Fox news, most of their reporting uses a creative license... why not patent the license and get it over with? Now everyone could pay royalties for the use of a story! Awesome!
The ultimate revenge of the Internet would indeed be to bar all access to controlled copyright material, and all references to and advertisements for the same. Leave nothing available but material in the public domain, copyleft and suchlike. Such an Internet would be more useful than the present one. No advertisements for anything other than 3D solid products. Quicker and easier search for real information in the public domain, like that from NASA and the NIH. Kids downloading Mozart and Bach recordings by amateur orchestras.
Thinking about it, I want it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Judge doesn't get tech, nothing to see here. Move along.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I have always felt that if you name your server WWW then you are consenting to linking. That is what the WWW is, a web of links. If you don't like it don't play here.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So you don't have any justification for your position other than "he's cool"?
You are willing to cast your own opinion aside in favor of one that clearly goes against the intent and the letter of the law, just because you like him?
Okay so I read his post. He is making economic arguments over whether or not we have a right.
Since when are judges supposed to use economic arguments to decide whether or not we have a right?
Am I reading this correctly?
Don't link (or provide a reference) to something, simply because it's copyrighted material?
I see... so what's next? How about: don't recommend a book, since that's a verbal or printed "link"? Don't point to a painting? Don't share a photo? Don't let someone read a newspaper you're finished with? Don't play a CD in the car?
Ban all libraries?
I don't care that this guy is a judge. I don't care about any so-called "legal" angle to this... this is plain and simple common sense that's being defied here.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
If no one clicks a link, does the site still get slashdotted?
What would happen to human discourse if we banned bibliographic references and footnotes, which are, after all, links to copyrighted materials?
And banning paraphrases? This could be used to squelch nearly all creative or derivative work.
How can anyone take this idea seriously?
It must be a valid comment. It has 72 words in one sentence! Wonder if he took a breath while saying that.
Although it would be a great setback for freedom of speech on the internet, it's not really going to make a difference. Technically page redirects, plain text urls, and shortcut files are not links.
On the other hand I would like to see how someone would try to enforce this garbage. It would more than likely lead to a plain text warez site or a software that retrieved plain text urls from a warez db.
The free distribution of information on the internet is challenging the fabric of a meritocratic society. This is why the copyright question is so difficult to answer. The judge makes perfect sense from a meritocratic perspective, but do we want that? I would prefer we moved towards a new set of values (probably peer based anarchism), but this would ultimately involve overhauling our entire politico economic system, pretty much in the same way that the renaissance and scientific enlightenment moved us from an autocratic/monarchist system to the meritocratic one we have today.
This isn't just the death of slashdot, it would be the death of the internet itself. No one will be allowed to link to ANY page unless it is owned or operated by the same company without getting express permission. This means that everything grinds to a complete halt because everything written (in the USA at least), IS copyrighted automatically. It might not have a specific copyright on file with the Library of Congress, but it is still copyrighted.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
So Lessig and Obama both have words of effusive praise for the man, and that's all very well, but to this armchair observer, Posner's suggestion is silly on its face for two reasons. First: As I'm sure Posner well knows, all works are copyrighted upon the instant of their creation. Every news article, every photo, every blog post, every tweet (twit?) -- all enjoy the full majesty of the copyright regime. Does that mean that everyone who hopes to publish anything needs to first become conversant in copyright law and the current state of the art in copyright litigation? Am I expected to append to every post, including this one, a hyperlink to a EULA? Absurd.
Even so, Posner's suggestion might have some arguable merit if it weren't for the other fact he appears to have skipped over -- copyrights today last effectively forever. Once you obtain a copyright on Happy Fun Ball, it's yours until well past the day you die. Copyrights throw up obstacles to creative expression. These obstacles are there to afford the artisan some isolation and breathing room to exploit their work exclusively before anyone else can horn in on it. But if copyright terms were more reasonable -- say, 28 years, as they were in the past -- then those obstacles would fall away over time and new creative forces could flow in and find and develop new ideas in the old material. But with eternal copyrights, this never happens. The obtacles that protect the creative artisan also hem him in and prevent him from moving anywhere else. You get gridlock, and once that happens the equation then devolves into who has the most money to fend off litigation when they decide to just go ahead and do what they want, anyway (*cough*Disney*cough*).
I'm not prepared to dismiss Posner entirely, however. I think he may be making the same error that Lawrence Lessig appears to have made (and recently appears to have realized), which is to argue from within the framework of the existing copyright regime ("the sun revolves around the earth"). It's fairly well established at this point that the existing regime doesn't work all that well, and cannot work well unless you want to completely sacrifice the freedom and autonomy people enjoy over their own computers. We need a Copernicus to come in and show us a new way of looking at things. I have a few meager ideas along these lines, which could benefit from spirited debate with the likes of Lessig and Posner, but I'm just a part-time armchair troll on Slashdot, and clearly beneath anyone's notice.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Whoever tagged this story as "humor" is, I think, missing the point...
Or else the tag as "humor" is an attempt at humor... In which case, about all I can say is that tagging it "funny" isn't funny, but calling it funny to call it funny is funny.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The obvious effect of no linking to newspaper sites (or other original material) is that Google page ranking will fall through the floor for such sites. The news web sites might allow Googlebot to search the site and index the material, but there won't be other sites linking to the newspaper sites and Google won't be able to use the amount of linking to judge the importance of the sites. Any sites which grant permission for everyone to link to them will soar in page ranking. Many blogs are likely to have higher link-based rankings than newspaper sites. Yes, Google will rank through other means as well, but restrictive sites will lose the indexing ability of the rest of web authors.
It would mean the death of all media online, because anything an author doesn't explicitly waive his rights to is under his copyright! Such a law would render linking to anything that wasn't under a free licence completely illegal. That a judge could be so cosmically ignorant of the law to not realise this is diabolical.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This is like removing the bibliography from books or any references to other materials in the book. Is the bookwriter infringing on the copyright by naming the title of another book, quoting it, or naming another source? How many books would have to be re-written before printing if this were applied? His argument that allowing links would make it so expensive for news sources that only the giants would be left is also nonsense, because these smaller sources (though they may ride other source's news) have shaken the giants through their own profitable ways of broadcasting the news. There are all kinds of ways to make money on the internet, and content providers are still discovering new methods. TV, newspaper, and magazine advertisements are not the only way to generate income for content. If anything, these sources will become better networked and utilize each other's sources to get the news. I don't see any difference in the competition and success as there was previously. These old dinosaurs are just trying to protect their territory and keep print in service because they're slow to adapt to the internet and they make huge profits off TV. Who's to stay a smaller news source wouldn't put out better programming than CNN or MSNBC (is FoxNews really news?)? Besides, most of the TV giants watch Facebook, Twitter, and Digg to get their news. Talk about trying to bite the hand that feeds them!
Don't most places with an online presence WANT links to their sites? It's people clicking through these links and getting page hits that generate ad revenue for them.
I dunno, dog. This idea is just okay for me, ya know.
Apologies for the OT comment, but look at my nick and you will understand.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What's the excuse for this one case of copyrighted things? Would the world stop using its creativity to generate news just because newspapers are not copyrighted? Are news creative work or something like that? (Ok, maybe some newspapers out there do make news up...)
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Why not just make it illegal for newspapers to go out of business? Seriously. We already pass stupid laws and what he is advocating is changing the law to prevent a basic part of the market to function. Shit happens. Businesses fail. Models change. This is the business equivalent of forbidding animals to migrate lest they evolve.
For this reason, we should ban horseless carriages.
...."
"a US Court of Appeals judge, about the struggling horse industry. Posner explains why he thinks the horse industry will continue to struggle, and then comes to a rather unusual conclusion: "Expanding copyright law to bar access to automobiles
Usually-insightful judge thinks out loud on his blog, shows he doesn't "get" the Web, makes tentative suggestion to stretch copyright to cover paraphrasing and linking, is skeletonized by bloggers in under 60 seconds.
On the other hand, of course he's making economic arguments about copyright: the whole two-hundred-year-old justification for copyright is that we chip away a bit at my right to repeat what you wrote in hopes that it'll give you an incentive to write more and better stuff, which makes everyone better off on the whole. When copyright implementation doesn't lead to broad economic rewards, there's no justification for it.
The real WTF here is... wait, wrong site. What's actually wrong with Posner's post is that he just doesn't understand why newspapers are dying: it's because they suck. The reporters are ignorant and biased, the editors are worse, the readers have never been the ones really paying the bills, actual news-gathering has been declining for decades, and when they piss off a chunk of their readers, that chunk can go elsewhere for their news now. That the "elsewhere" is frequently of far better quality is just an extra stake through the heart.
bipartisanship, n.: when both parties gang up on you
The problem is simply taking articles verbatium from a newspaper (or other web site) and putting the content on your own site.
Doesn't happen? Hah. Of course it does. Because as anyone under the age of 30 will tell you, once it is on the Internet it is free to use however you want. So of course you are going to have anything and everything copied out from newapaper sites, CNN, USA Today, and whatever else there is.
Now is this what is destroying the value of news gathering in the US today? I don't really think so.
However, this is going to be a continuing problem and it is doubtful that anyone under 30 today even comprehends why it might be a bad idea to do this.
Probably one of the most basic features of the web, one that practically defines it, are links. Putting things in internet, and want to artificially forbid linking is against its nature, is like putting a paper in the water and write a law forbidding that it gets wet. If you want that something not get linked, then don't put in internet, use something else (a book, in not electronic format, i.e.).
College students, book writers, newspaper journalists, and even bloggers and Wikipedia, etc all cite copyrighted sources and paraphrase what they say to avoid plagiarism. That was covered in the Copyright Act as 'Fair Use', which does not seem to exist these days, based on this judge's opinions and views.
When you link or cite a source, you are not stealing copyrighted materials, when you paraphrase you are putting in your own words a summation of what that source was trying to say. In fact, you are promoting that copyrighted materials and may have caused some people to buy that copyrighted material based on what you wrote.
This is not the same as copying and pasting the entire copyrighted material, or even stealing the copyrighted material without paying.
In the USA we used to have something called Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press that would allow a person to put in their own words even what copyrighted material might say, as long as they cite their source or link to it. But now, Copyright Law is UnConstitutional if it restricts Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press if it is changed to the way this judge wants it changed.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Umm no, considering who he is, its rather usual and predictable.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
..so you're saying that they want to make it illegal for me to even discuss news stories, let alone actually putting a link to one in my own blog? What is this, has print media decided to start taking lessons from the RIAA?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
His post makes the assumption that older people often make but younger people make much less often: newspapers are worth saving.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
1. Create webpage containing public domain content
2. Have it linked to
3. Change content to copyrighted content
4. Sue
5. Profit
No ??? necessary
If a man in a clicks on a link, and there's no woman in the forest, is he still wrong?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's clear that we need professional journalists to exist, to write stories beyond what can be done by amateur bloggers. But there's no reason that these journalists have to work in media-- that is, the journalists don't have to be employed by the distribution mechanisms like newspapers. IMVHO, one good route might be to have non-profit journalism organizations, supported by grants and reader contributions, who do the reporting and writing. They can provide their reports on a website for free or for pay, and also sell them to local newsbundlers who produce a hardcopy of the day's news for commuters and other people who like a physical paper (maybe printed on demand). Because they're non-profit, they might be able to attract charitable contributions, and even if they charge for news access on their websites, it isn't such a big deal to have their stories showing up on blogs or paraphrased, so long as no one is doing so regularly and blatantly (e.g. posting all the day's stories on their blog). Perhaps they could run a system where for a certain fee, a blogger could "adopt" a story's link and make it freely available for everyone to read. There will be cheating, but maybe there's enough money in it for them too.
We also need to develop a sense among people that paying for the news is a citizens' responsibility, when they can afford it. One way to do this is to provide funding for news agencies out of federal or state taxes, although some might balk at the government deciding which news agencies are worthy of the funding. Another possibility could be to have such a tax, but also provide a tax waiver for anyone who can prove that they have donated $X to a news agency in the past year. That gives people the right to support news agencies of their own choice if they so desire, although we'll have to watch out for fraud with people setting up false newspapers or newssites, particularly political candidates. We could make payments to newspapers and other news agencies a potential itemized deduction, and look for fraud via the usual tax audits.
Or maybe something less formal is better: how can we change the perceptions of a culture, so that we recognize that some things are worth paying for?
It's ironic, but in the interest of outdoing the American school of capitalism the Chinese have both taken a page from our history, set an (atypical) example of something the Chinese post-Maoists didn't totally fuck up, and pulled the whole thing off while pretending they give a shit what we say to them about it. All while selling us shit AND distorting global capitalism out of our favor! If they would only apply that same ironic derring do towards not being totalitarian dickholes about pretty much everything else they would actually be better than us at not being a totally shitty nation. Not that we give a shit, Bush the first was kowtowing after Tienaman and we were all looking the other way as the spice flowed just as fast as Bush the lesser kowtowed after that whole mysterious spy plane crash landing in China thing that everyone forgot about when he started The War Against Terror. Weren't the Olympics fucking awesome though? It's all worth it to some.
Shut yer analog pie hole...yeah...or something.
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... we'll be listening to NPR, thank you very much.
It should be very easy to explain to any copyright holder how then can prevent linking to or downloading their documents.
First, you explain that a web server is basically a very simple program: It has a directory, and anything you put in that directory (or any subdirectory) is handed out via HTTP by your web server. Any file not in that directory is not handed out to anyone.
So to prevent unauthorized linking or downloading, all you have to do is not put your file(s) in the web server's directory. It really is that simple. If you do that, then you don't need to mess with expensive lawsuits to protect your valuable Intellectual Property. The web server will protect it for you, by not handing it out when someone asks or follows a link to your site.
Think they could understand this?
(Lessee; do really need a ;-) here? Nah ....)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Weak. I don't mean that the strategy of "campaign contributions" in exchange for favorable legislation doesn't work. I mean it doesn't do any good to obtain favorable legislation over things that are beyond the reach of the law. Yet they keep trying. These lobbying campaigns ought to consider a simple thought before they proceed to waste time and money on foolishness. The mere fact that they are turning to desperate rearguard legal remedies to force an idea to work is strong evidence that there are no technological or social reasons it could work.
Laws against killing are a very weak reed next to the social opprobrium that is the real strength behind "thou shalt not kill", as OJ Simpson discovered. Mexico also has such laws, but there, social opposition might possibly be weaker, or so it seems to those like me who read of drug gang related killings in Mexico. Same with the typical blighted inner city neighborhood. Or, same as back in the "good old days" when lynchings and racially motivated murders were much more common. However that is, society's opposition to killing is far greater than against the kinds of behavior that copyright maximalists dislike, which is minimal at most. Laws against that haven't a prayer of being obeyed or being enforceable by means of social pressure.
Such efforts just make lawmakers look clueless, out of touch, and stupid. Or corrupt. Are all the policy wonks, analysts, scientists, and real experts being ignored? Did the anti-science Bushies manage to turf them all out? Perhaps lobbyists can afford to irresponsibly push their own agendas without any clue whether it is a good idea or possible or, worse, knowing that it isn't in the public interest but doing all they can to spin the issue and bamboozle the politicians. And perhaps the too sophisticated among the politicians are happy to take the bribes and deliver legislation they already know will be worthless. They shouldn't. Doing so at best just clogs government.
Posner evidently can't see that links both cannot and should not be regulated. His nonsense merely "teases the animals", giving these copyright maximalists unwarranted hope.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Next time someone links to youtube he/she should be arrested for linking to copyrighted material.
It would seem that while your Honor's sympathy towards the fledgling paper industry is indeed honorable thy judgment is sorely misguided.
Out with the old, in with the new and improved.
All libraries should be closed too.
And no more browsing at the bookstore.
Isn't everything written automatically copyrighted? wouldn't this make all linking illegal unless something is explicitly stated as public domain?
...to give directions to a book store. After all this is indeed "linking to copyrighted material".
Why do you think China is kicking our asses so hard? Yes, it is partially lax environmental laws there
While that may be true---I don't know---it's interesting to note what Hans Rosling pointed out in one of his TED talks*, as countries get wealthier and decrease their infant mortality, they all start emitting more CO2.
That is, no country knows how to get rich without polluting. China's getting rich is not more "at the expense of the environment" than anyone else's getting rich.
* http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html. I don't know which of the three videos, but watch them all because they're good ;-)
Websites are billboards that are designed to be looked at.
Any website that wants to prevent anyone from linking to their 'content' can simply install a "door" with a "lock" (a password" to protect the content).
If you don't want someone to look at your website or your billboard, then you don't create it open to view from passersby...
This idiocy won't get off the ground.
Capitalism isn't suited to a non-scarcity based economy -- since the only way capitalism can continue to work is to induce artificial scarcities where there really are none.
The only way to do that is to create laws restricting access to access to things people already take for granted and already have access to. It'll be like
the war on drugs, except that it will be every "Intellectual Property" -- and on a scale 10x as large.
The big loser -- will be the parasites who profit off of 'free information' being sold again and again -- getting rich and depleting the worlds resources and capital -- lowering standards of living and lowering productivity, and lowering overall progress needed for humans to survive and prosper into the next millennium. Without drastic attitude changes in people 'in power', there will be no humans next millennium, or humans will have devolved to tribal status and be subject/victim to whatever natural disaster comes along -- resulting in our eventual extinction.
If we don't solve the energy crunch issue -- and don't "free up wealth" the concept of 'wealth', and don't raise up the humanity, as a whole, we are dead. Unfortunately, no one living to day really cares much about life after their death (or their children's death). It's already the case, in the US, that the standard of living for the current generation is on track to decline from the previous generation -- and further declines are expected after that. Unless we create large, new, amounts of raw resources, we don't have anything even close to what is necessary in this world to support a standard of living even half that of what exists in the US.
Globalization-> leads to lower standard of living for top inventors and will limit technological growth as "high tech" knowledge becomes a 'luxury' -- we'll be stuck at the "using up resources" phase -- in a non-renewable, non-sustainable way -- until massive shortages destroy our civilization. At current rates of consumption against known reserves some materials will run out this century. Some within the next decade.
We are going downhill as a species -- because we are all like the lobsters you put in a barrel -- they will keep pulling down the ones that are almost about to escape, so that all are trapped and all die. That's us and our current morality/mindset.
Only a new religion of humanity, of caring and reducing suffering among all feeling creatures now and for all time in the future (no taking now at expense of the future), will we turns things around.
I believe that only a religion of sacrifice will bring the commitment necessary for our species to grow beyond our current condition and have the possibility of surviving by growing beyond this planet. A religion could inspire the passion necessary for the sacrifices and changes necessary -- and a religion could spread...but I don't know of any other form of human institution or system that could bring about the changes necessary.
Most certainly religions that focus on 'afterlife' and letting things slide in this life-time for reward in the next life are certainly an anathema to the survival of the species and should be, as enemies of humanity -- seen as pure and destructive evil, now matter how much they cloak themselves with good works or words of faith and belief.
linda
Many people seem to like consuming ad-financed stuff. Why do you assume if you don't pay for access to something, it is free? It should be obvious that we all pay for "free-tv", "free" news sites and other ad-supported things when we buy the products that are advertised there.
When you pay directly for access, you have a choice. When you think it's free, they have already made you pay. And then you pay, even if you don't visit! It's effectively a private tax. The only way to not pay it is to watch for ads and then not buy what is advertised - seems unpractical.
Richard Posner is an interesting guy; the kind of guy who'd be great on a law school faculty but who's a little scary on the bench. He thinks outside the box and is not afraid of taking positions most people think are wrong.
I've come across his name in reading about privacy. Posner is famous for opposing the concept of right of privacy. "Is there a right of privacy?" is the kind of question somebody should ask; having people seriously examine this question is good for society. Having people on the bench who don't believe there is a right to privacy is a different matter.
So he's not the kind of person who would balk from turning things upside down if he had an internally consistent theory that supported it. Not an activist judge, but something much worse: a philosopher judge.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I do find it mildly amusing that in a time when we hear of wholesale meesing with the news in other "regimes" it seems quite acceptable for the current ruling junta of the US, the great corporations, are allowed to mess with freedom, free speech in such a way. You call it copyright, I call it censorship.
I find this hilarious. So newspapers (which largeley get their news tips from people calling in for free) are claiming it's reporter salaries that make the bulk of the costs of running a newspaper, and not the costs of operating the gigantic printing presses etc. Sure, and I'll be looking at that land deal you have in Florida now. Give me a break. Following that same logic no newspaper should be allowed to quote people who make statements in a telelvised press conference b/c televising it IS publishing it, and therefore they'd be guilty of a copyright violation. But obviously we've made a fair use exception if your goal is to write a news article. Why would the same not apply on the web. The real thing is $$$. I used to run a non-profit news website. I was turned down for press credentials in most cases b/c I didn't have a paper that was sponsored via ad revenue. this for example, at the time (if not still currently) was the rule even for the White House. So I wasn't given press credentials b/c I didn't have advertisers, and to the White House you're not a real legitimate news gathering organization unless you have advertising revenue. So it's obvious that the Newspaper industry is the beneficiary of laws that favor them over amateur bloggers. And that begs the issue, why? As in why are we trying to support the news industry rather than realizing why it's failing. Newspapers are failing because they charge too much for ad space. According to a NY Times report (that out of respect for Dipshit Posner I won't link to) 53% of their ad space is going unsold. In any other industry you'd discount the rate and try to get a higher volume of ad space sold. But for trully ridiculous reasons Newspapers still think they can charge for the same ad space even with subscriptions on the decline. And people are increasingly turning to the internet because the ability to contstantly update and follow stories makes it much better than reading daily newspapers. Nowhere is this discrepancy more obvious than sports coverage. Sure I could have a newspaper subscription and follow my team's success over a bowl of fruit loops everyday at breakfast or I can log onto ESPN and find out whether my team is winning or losing the game while it's still being played. Which choice are most people who want to follow a team going to choose? If we treated other technologies like we're starting to treat newspapers vs. the internet we would: still be using telegraph machines instead of cell phone. use explosive celuloid film instead of digital video use horse drawn buggies instead of cars. use handset printing instead of moveable type or better yet only release news via illuminated manuscripts. Face it. Internet is beating the pants off traditional newspapers b/c they are just better. And internet thrives on linking. All passing a law change like this would mean that websites would only link to materials that were published under non-traditional copyright agreements or released into the public domain. IE. no one would link to traditional newspapers anymore, and it's not like people would then start buying newspaper subscriptions, so I'm quite certain that newspapers would make even less money than they do now.
And at the moment, they haven't broken any law.
So this judge thinks that changing the law so he can have them arrested and jailed is a good thing.
Willy-waving
Reed-Elsevier announced, beginning July 4th of this year, a new licensing structure for Lexis-Nexis articles cited as precedent in court cases. "We expect volume discounting to keep the cost per cite down to $10,000 per case, per judge, and per referencing attorney", a Reed spokesman said.
Hey, it could happen, given Judge Posner's reasoning.
...if linking to copyrighted material were made illegal, I would *stop* reading newspaper articles. I only ever see those to which I link through Google News.
As usual, the judge has got it backwards. Linking is what the Web is all about. If your copyrighted material is so precious you don't want anyone linking to it, your remedy is perfectly simple. Don't post it on the Web.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Please keep linking to our copyrighted material. Without website traffic, we might be out of business. We still circ a lot of papers but the web is the future, and any newspaper people who say otherwise ain't paying attention.
Yes it's a problem that the news agencies are not being compensated adequately for their efforts and can not continue to exist in their current form without a new model or some guarantees for their existing model.
No this is not a legal problem.
The big issue seems to be that 99% of people are happy reading a headline and a quick summary of some news item. Apparently only a small percentage actually click through to the article (as we are well aware on /.)
Seems to me that this is a problem of their own creation. People have been trained on Headline News... soundbites, etc.
Look at 60 Minutes, blogs and /. as an analogue to what the news organizations really need to do. If you want to train people to actually read the article you've got to:
a) provide in-depth reporting that is truly engaging.
b) provide first person opinions that people can relate or oppose and then let them voice their opinion.
c) provide a forum for discussion on the topic.
None of these solutions fix the problem of people being satisfied with Headlines... those need to be loss-leaders. News organizations need to get over themselves as the "primary source" or "we got the scoop" providers. Nobody cares anymore. They'll either hear about it from a friend, the TV news, online or via txt or RSS... at a time and frequency of their choosing. You can't control when people choose to get up-to-date with current events.
What you can do is provide bonus material and added benefit.
News agencies have the resources and experience to provide a wealth of value add to their sites. They just don't want to apparently or they want to do so in a way that can't compete with alternative outlets.
This is not a legal problem, it's a business problem. Compete or get out of the competition.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Another example of the completely clueless judiciary in the US.
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isn't anything, I mean ANYTHING that is on the internet copyright of someone whether it be judged by TOS of the host (in the case of some social networking sites and such)or your own? In other words, wouldn't you not be able to link to anything on the internet at all from anywhere except your own site and your own content?
It's worse than that. A work need not say "Copyright by blah blah blah" in order for it to be copyrighted. In the US, Canada, and most Western nations, *ALL* works of art, literature, music, etc are instantly the property of the creator(s), unless assigned to another party (such as through "work for hire").
In theory, if this crazy judge had his way, EVERY link to another web page that is not your own would be a violation of copyright (except to those rare pages explicitly stated as being in the public domain).
the stupidest idea i have ever heard like some above said the death of /. and any type of sharing of info. Does this person even understand how to use the internet he's born in 1939 he obviously doesn't know what hes talking about. Stupid honky.
"Unfortunately, no one can be told where copyrighted material is. You have to find it for yourself."
If only this also meant the end of intrusive advertising by agents of the copyright holder. Taken to the extreme and off-line, those would be the only people authorized to tell you where any copyrighted material could be found to be consumed according to Judge Posner. You could tell people you saw a particular movie and recommend they see it too, but you couldn't tell them where: they'd have to find an official advertisement of showing times on their own.
Combined with the opinion than links to links to copyrighted material are themselves links to copyrighted material, you couldn't even tell someone where theaters showing movies could be found, or how they could find where they can find where they are found. So you can't tell them where to buy a newspaper.
What do you say? Should we end the free ride copyright holders get from word-of-mouth publicity?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Suing people for linking or paraphrasing online (news) content. Seriously? Isn't this essentially the ethos of shared knowledge?
So much for any kind of modern research papers... illegal. Good luck with that academia.
It isn't the fault of bloggers or news aggregators, it's the print news's business model. If you don't like the way the internet has developed around your ill-conceived vision of your papers online content, re-develop your site to work with modern trends; don't use the law to re-engineer the internet to work around you. Wow.
And yet if you call your unauthorized copy "cached" then you're delightfully free to redistribute as many copies as you want; and sell ads concurrently. Some keep looking for a robots.txt clause in the copyright code, but so for the clause has no claws.