Judge Posner Argues In Favor Of Prohibiting Links To News Articles And Even Paraphrasing

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 would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.
becker-posner-blog.com • 6.29.09 @2:21PM • Copyright
Hayden Frost   In terms of market strength, the newspaper's position is horse shit because they already have the technological ability to prevent linking. They could just check the user's referrer and if it's an unpaid source, forward the visitor to the front page or a pay wall. The forwarder itself would take minutes to write (it's 2 lines of code), and a few hours of coding to put together the whole system with account management.

This is one of those things where they want the link juice and they want you to pay for it. But the market completely isn't along with these lines, and that's why they haven't done it yet. Coase theorem is right on with this one. Regardless of how the "rights" are legislated, the market will push the system back into the current equilibrium. As soon as these guys actually get this garbage legislation passed, all the new media sites will waive these "rights against being linked to" and we'd even set up bot readable licensing schemas so that it can all be automated. When the link juice makes a quick about-face, all the established media will bitch and complain, and they'll also waive their "right against being linked to".

Then again, here at TTH, we can wait for these guys to put up paywalls. We have a few things in store over the next few months and expect that paywalls will only help us out.   6.30.09 @12:15AM