
American judge proposes a ban on linking to online content without permission - danw
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/01/richard-posner-copyright-linking-newspapers
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TrevorJ
So basically, he wants to ban the basic underlying concept behind the internet
as it was conceived in the first place?

It is as if he said he wants to prosecute football players for battery when
they tackle an opponent. By stepping on the field in a uniform you are
agreeing to play inside the rules of the game. Linking is one of the rules of
the game on the internet.

Couldn't we use the legal argument that posting something online without
taking further steps to password protect it or what have you is implied
consent for the content to be linked to?

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grellas
There is no way that existing copyright law can even remotely be stretched to
say that incidental linking to a site on the web constitutes copyright
infringement.

This would be akin to saying that a library's use of the Dewey decimal system
to help you locate a book infringes the copyright held by the book's owner
because it directs you where to find it.

The judge's proposal is purely a political one and that is why it appears in a
blog.

Unless _Congress_ acts to do a radical extension of current copyright law,
linking of any normal type will not come under legal scrutiny of any sort,
even from Judge Posner (who, whatever else he is, is nobody's fool). The
danger here will lie with politicians who might succumb to lobbying pressure.
It will not come from judges.

~~~
TrevorJ
It's more like me mentioning a book and telling you where to go to buy it is
copyright infringement. Terrible idea.

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padmanabhan01
I don't see the point in this. Any publisher or news site who wants people to
sign up or pay (with a password) can do so already, without being affected by
anyone linking to it. Those who choose to make it public, will want more
people to see it I guess.

If copying content from a site is what he means, yes, it should be banned and
that makes sense, but how can linking to a public URL be an issue? I just
don't see how.

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khafra
I hate to say that not even American legislative and judiciary branches could
be stupid enough to outlaw the anchor tag, because they prove me wrong half
the time I make that sort of assumption. But this is really another "series of
tubes" moment; I don't think it'll go anywhere.

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danw
I thought the "series of tubes" was an excellent analogy for the internet.

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smanek
I don't think it's that part of Stevens' speech that bugged people.

He also said: "an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning
on Friday. I got it [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these
things going on the Internet commercially." And a lot of other gibberish about
network neutrality.

~~~
danw
Ahh, that makes sense. I hadn't heard his entire talk, only the "series of
tubes" snippet that was repeated and played upon.

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Semiapies
Ah, Richard Posner. I have _never_ understood why he's so well thought-of
among a lot of politically-inclined geeks. I can only guess it was the public
hate-on he had for MS back during the anti-trust trial.

Anyone who'd suggest "Expanding copyright law to bar...linking to or
paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent",
especially to prop up _newspapers'_ websites, should be reviled by geeks.

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mikecuesta
Really unbelievable.

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nazgulnarsil
allowing old people to regulate technology is like putting fish in charge of
the FAA.

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mattmanser
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. In reality fair use has been
wilfully abused by internet aggregators. At the moment we're in the absurd
situation where the aggregators like google, youtube, etc. make money for
serving other people's content for free.

And what's worse is that because they've got used to all content being stolen
they value it so lowly that Amazon are prepared to offer the content providers
just 30%!

Look it from a different perspective and bloggers aren't a news-source,
they're ill-informed, amateur, unaccountable commentators. We need the papers.
Sites like YouTube don't make quality content, they steal it and serve it for
free. Google doesn't create any websites, it steals your money by advertising
competitors products right next to yours.

I love the internet as it is, but I honestly believe it's not going to last.

~~~
mustpax
Have you heard if this thing called the robots.txt file? To get all those
pesky, content-stealing search engines off your lawn, all you need to do is
put the following two lines in your robots.txt file:

    
    
      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /
    

This has the added benefit of reducing load on your servers greatly, which
means you can get cheaper hosting. It's really a win-win.

For the rest of your comment, I can't really say anything without being
pointlessly snide.

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catfish71
>I can't really say anything without being pointlessly snide.

Congratulations, you just summarized the Web 2.0 experience with a sentence
fragment.

