A few days ago I wrote about Judge Richard Posner’s recent suggestion that a wholesale change in copyright law might be in order to save the newspaper industry:
I simply cannnot fathom how [Judge Posner] can conclude that it would be constitutional for a government to eliminate my ability to say “the New York times said such and such” or “I heard this and that on CSPAN.”
If the government ever does enact such a law and it does pass constitutional muster, blogs will die faster than a fruit fly on President Obama’s arm.
My friends over at The Volokh Conspiracy agree with me:
So what Judge Posner is proposing is, necessarily, an Internet-wide prohibition on linking or paraphrasing without the copyright holder’s consent. Given (2) the fact that virtually all content on the Internet (at least if it displays a “modicum of creativity” and is not simply copied from another source verbatim) is protected by copyright the moment that it is placed into a readable file, that’s it for the Internet as we know it – any act of linking or paraphrasing such as this one will require copryight-holder consent.
So here we’ve gone and invented this fabulous global machine for linking and paraphrasing and sharing information, but nobody will be able to use it because we want to preserve the New York Times’ business model. Hmmm.
I have always admired Richard Posner. I frequently return to his classic book Law and Literature and always find something brilliant I missed on prior visits.
He has over the years come up with so many good ideas that I am compelled to conclude that in this instance, like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World (pictured at right), he has formulated a bad idea “just so he can see what it feels like.”
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1 Rupert Murdoch CEO Wants to Criminalize Bad Blogging! // Jul 2, 2009 at 7:54 am
[...] recently wrote in Death of Blogging and Death of Blogging II
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