Sun, 28 Jun 2009

Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal

All material is implicitly copyrighted: if this rule were put into effect, it would essentially destroy the Internet as we know it, by banning all hyperlinks without the linked sites prior permission.

Such a measure would actually create and perpetuate the monopolies Posner says he wants to avoid.

This is beyond moronic. From what little of I know of Judge Posner, he'd always seemed like a judge who kind of "gets it". Now, I'm not so sure he could find his ass with both hands in a brightly lit room.

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."

(link) [Slashdot]

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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