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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."
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.
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'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.
It would be so hilarious if they made this a real law. Sites like Slashdot would not die... sites that sued for being linked to would die. See... if you are in the search engine then the search engine *has* a link to your material. That means if you copyright your work and post it and linking to copyrighted material is illegal *then* you work will be invisible. If you can't be found on a search engine then you don't exist on the internet.
People won't be able to email links to your stuff to each other since that would be illegal so effectively no one would be able to tell others about your work. It would mean the death of copyrighted material on line.
In other news they just passed a law in my state that all online sales to sites hosted in this state must pay sales tax. Guess what that will mean? No sites will be hosted in this state.
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 has been discussed on /. over and over again: if you don't want to make it public, don't publish it. Especially on the web. "Hey, look at what I did! It's a sign in the middle of the street, but don't tell anyone else about it or I'll sue you."
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".
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.
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
I have to disagree slightly. I don't think persons who would pull the plug would do so to save their margins. They would pull the plug because they can't control the Internet, and this goads them. They have built a perception of their own power into which the Internet doesn't factor. In these cases complaints about lost profits are often a red herring--it's about power.
The death of the internet.
All content (including this comment) is implicitly copyrighted. Fair use allows you to quote this text and comment on it. Making links to copyrighted material (read ALL material) illegal, makes links (all links) illegal. A WWW without links isn't a WWW. Tim Berners-Lee's break-through in the development of the WWW was the hyper-link. Without the hyperlink, there is no internet.
Internet RIP.
Then everybody would just omit the tags.
Lots of forums that link to copyrighted material already tell people to put stuff in code tags, one so that they don't get in the server logs (referral in header), second that they don't provide links (hey, it's just plaintext!).
Actually I predict if this kind of asshattery is allowed that all the sites like Slashdot will simply be moved out of the USA to a place with more sane copyright laws. If they keep this shit up the USA is gonna be left all alone as some "insanity island" while everyone else gets with the program and moves to the 21st century.
Why do you think China is kicking our asses so hard? Yes, it is partially lax environmental laws there, but I would argue that it is also because they completely ignore American copyrights and patents and therefor have a more cutthroat business model where "he who makes the best widget wins" while we have a "patent and copyright the hell out of everything, then sit back and sue" model going and it sucks. Does anybody else think that if Linux or some other OS suddenly shot up to...say 15%+ market share that Apple and MSFT would bury them in lawsuits? Nope, me neither.
Our patents and copyrights have simply choked the life out of all innovation here. Trying to get anything done in the USA is like navigating a minefield, with the millions of patents and copyrights and patent trolls just waiting to pounce. I predict the USA will just be stuck more and more to the sidelines while the third world explodes with new ideas built upon American ideas but without a bunch of copyright and patent bullshit to slow them down. I am not saying we should abolish all patents and copyrights, I am saying we need to bring sanity back to the discussion. I would say patents should be a flat 25 years, copyrights 5-15 due to the ease of selling ideas thanks to the digital medium. Either way our copyrights and patents have gotten too ridiculous as the judge proves and will just serve to have more business avoid the USA like the clap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
If I were to write something groundbreaking and interesting (sure, it's far-fetched but it's just an example folks) then newspapers or other sites may pick up on the story and link to my site. Then I change the content they link to into some sort of top 100 list of what the MPAA and friends track and sue over. Will the MPAA not only come after me, but all the newspapers too? Will the newspapers be at fault? Will I be at fault both for my "crime" and the newspapers now illegal links?
This is the sort of things that makes me feel like I have too much spare time...
Then he's a cock-end, because his job is to fucking well interpret the law as it is.
And let's not forget how Posner, Bork et. al. castrated Anti-Trust law, ("hey, what's so bad about monopolies?"), which is, after all, statute law.
The guy is a third-rate intellect and a dangerous ideologue who should never have been let anywhwere near the bench.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
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