How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking
Found on TechCrunch on Saturday, 27 June 2009
Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee.
He wants to "bar linking" to newspaper articles or any copyrighted material without the "copyright holder's consent." I am sorry Judge Posner, but I don't need to ask your permission to link to your blog post or to a newspaper article online. That is just the way the Web works. If newspapers don't like it, they don't need to be on the Web.
Where does Judge Posner think all of these newspaper sites get their readers? It is mostly through links, not direct traffic. Removing the links would obliterate the majority of the online readership for many newspapers.
No problem, no problem. If a newspaper has a problem with links, it just needs to say so and the whole Internet will happily remove any link pointing to it, effectively killing it. Not to mention the rest of the world will not allow said newspaper to use their sources. Double-kill. Sorry Posner, but have you ever heard about the Internet before? Or even used it? Not to mention that everybody outside the US will not give a damn about a law that prohibits sites inside the states from linking.