How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking
from the article quoted from blog post (ironic)
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 …A comment from the hackernews post
True story. I show up 5 minutes late to a lunch/forum about the future of news here in Chicago featuring Carl Bernstein plus the editors of the Sun-Times, Tribune and other local publications. I find a seat at a table of youngsters and find out they’re all undergrads at Northwestern’s journalism program, where I earned an MSJ. I introduce myself, tell them I run a news aggregator for local stuff. One turns to me. “I hate what you do. You’re ruining the industry.” “Wha?” Intrigued, I try to figure out what she means through a series of increasingly specific questions about what she doesn’t like until finally I ask the big one: “Do you think it’s wrong for a web site to link to another web site?” “Yes. Unless they’ve paid the site they’re linking to for the right to do so.” That explained everything. I’m not unsympathetic to her POV. She wants to be a reporter, and those jobs are increasingly hard to come by. She blames “the blogs” for this. I explained that there are many more opportunities out there for her to report and inform the public that didn’t involve working for a newspaper. She wasn’t interested. It always amazes me how reporters can be so clever and entrepreneurial in their reporting while being so darn conservative and narrow-minded in how they manage their careers.[link]
