Via TechCrunch, US Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner is proposing making linking to copyrighted content illegal without consent. More past the jump.
Take a look at his blog:
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.
Notice that according to him, what I just did should be illegal. I shouldn't need to point out how incredibly stupid this idea is, and the TechCrunch article says the same. Kos has addressed the sheer idiocy of blocking linking more than once, but basically it boils down to one thing.
Without linking, newspapers' readership will literally drop to zero.
Most of these papers get vast amounts of traffic from hotlinks on other sites. How much of the NY Times' opinion columns are driven by our Pundit roundups, I wonder? And blocking people from linking successfully to your content is a relatively trivial programming exercise if you're content to stop 90% instead of 100%. If the newspapers do block linking to their online content, just like the AP seems permanently on the verge of doing, people won't start going to their homepages, and clicking on their ads. Once you vanish off Google, you're no longer a news source. Instead, sites like Daily Kos etc will pop up, and local newspapers will see their chance to shine.
So thank you, Judge Richard Posner, for proposing a legal backing for newspapers to commit suicide. And that doesn't even begin to address the incredible violations of fair use and general abuse of copyright involved in this. Not to mention your catastrophic failure to understand anything about how the web works.