I suppose he won’t like my linking to an article about him, but that’s just tough. I have no tolerance for morons, and even less so when they’re judges and are supposed to know better.
Richard Posner, a conservative judge in the US, wants to ban hyperlinks – e.g., those found on blogs and even on many newspaper websites.
Those who wish to keep the internet free and open had best dust off their legal arguments. One of America's most influential conservative judges, Richard Posner, has proposed a ban on linking to online content without permission. The idea, he said in a blog post last week, is to prevent aggregators and bloggers from linking to newspaper websites without paying.
This may already sound rather bad, but now read what Posner writes in his original piece (and, yes, I will link to and quote from it):
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.
Let’s see what’s wrong with this nonsense theory.
Banning hyperlinks to free content in order to keep it free
Honestly, has anyone ever heard anything more moronic? I can see, for example, that newspapers might want to ban news aggregators like Google News, because they are competitors. But every link a newspaper site receives, such as from a blogger who graciously links to a story on the newspaper’s website, should be celebrated. As a matter of fact, bloggers should get a commission or share of the profits for driving eyeballs to the newspaper website. In some cases, a substantial portion of newspapers’ site traffic is derived from bloggers today.
Paraphrasing should be banned too
That would put an end to the entire newspaper racket right there. Most news reports in newspapers are a series of direct quotes and paraphrased quotes in indirect speech. If paraphrasing were banned too, it would leave a lot of empty space on newspaper pages. Newspapers themselves would be reduced to single-page editions.
We shouldn’t forget in this context that any non-opinion, non-editorial pieces in newspapers are factual accounts of current events (at least in theory). Which means that the entire story, say, about the latest ethnic clashes in China, has to be – by definition – a paraphrase from beginning to end.
Linking to content is and should be a copyright violation
Sorry, but this silly nonsense of an idea would never stand up in a court of law – unless the presiding judge is a moron too. If linking to copyrighted material were illegal, then what about all the long pages and pages and pages of bibliography and references in, say, scientific papers? The very existence of such a list of “links” to names of authors, titles of books or papers, etc. would be a major felony – as would be any quote from or paraphrasing of any of the titles thus referenced.
No, no, no, this moronic idea will never fly. Apart from being utterly stupid, it’s also an underhanded attempt to silence citizen journalists and, thus, a major affront to people’s right of free speech.
Happy Hyperlinking!
Posner probably believes a State Legislature can pass a law making π=3.0 (as has been tried in several Dixie states) and thus make it so.
"I know this defies the law of gravity, but then, I never studied law" works for Bugs Bunny — and only Bugs.
Posted by: Bruce Stewart | July 08, 2009 at 07:58 AM