Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal In Order to Save Old Media
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.
In: Rights Online · Tagged with: copyright, dinosaurs, law, linking, new media, old media
Loading ...
on June 29, 2009 at 12:08 am
· Permalink
We should have a new category for this type of posts. We could call it free culture or your rights online like in Slashdot.
on June 29, 2009 at 1:16 pm
· Permalink
New category added
on April 24, 2010 at 1:45 am
· Permalink
We should just let the printed media die. Obviously it can’t compete with online sources which are faster, more up-to-date, can be edited instantaneously, waste less resources, and cost less money. It’s survival of the fittest. Sorry if people lose jobs. Sucks for them, they must not be the fittest.