LINKING IS NOT A CRIME ( CC-BY-NC Credit: Ross Mayfield on flickr)

Many newspapers are having a really difficult time these days. Also they are now facing competition from many online news sources and their classifieds business has been crippled by websites like craigslist.com. A judge makes a controversial suggestion on how to save them:

“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.”

I think this idea is completely ridiculous. davester666, a commenter from Slashdot, couldn’t have put it better…

“This sounds like a “new methods are making an old business model obsolete, so we should outlaw the new methods type thing.”"

If you care about these type of issues I would recommend supporting the EFF by taking action or donating. This type of issues affect us all, this issue in particular would crush our own little blog BTW this is a repost of a post on Free Culture News, another blog I started posting to recently.