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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.
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.
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?
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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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.
Old man yells at cloud.
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.
All the intellect in the world won't overcome what you may call an institutional bias. For that you need wisdom. The most obvious difference is that intellect will increasingly complicate, while wisdom will show that all the complication derives from a few simple principles.
Being a prominent figure in a large institution impresses men. That's about as much as it has to do with "truth". It really doesn't take very much to understand why freedom is precious and should be values and protected. Simple, humble minds can easily grasp that. The intellect and complexity and scholarship is necessary in order to create justifications for why freedom should be taken away. The ultimate expression of this is sort of like a priesthood, where you should accept our edicts because as one of the uninitiated laity, you would not be capable of understanding our reasons. An effect like that is why you saw the name and this prevented you from going with your intuition and dismissing this as the maladaptive idea it really is.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
- 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.
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!
Being a prominent figure in a large institution impresses men.
That gives him a leg up on the rest of us in lobbying his legislators to pass the laws that he 'thinks' are needed. Other than that, he's just like any other Joe Citizen as far as the legislative process is concerned.
Judges have no role whatsoever in enacting laws.
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?
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!
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
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?
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"
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?
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
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
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.
...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.