Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal

[wraggster]

An article at TechCrunch discusses a blog post from Richard Posner, a US Court of Appeals judge, about the struggling newspaper industry. Posner explains why he thinks the newspapers will continue to struggle, and then comes to a rather unusual conclusion: "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."

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06...uld-Be-Illegal

[Hypershell]

That is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

He's essentially saying word-of-mouth should be illegal on the internet, which will cave in the attendance on all online news sources, be they professional or conglomerates. No way, no how, would that ever be constitutionally sound, not to mention it'd be impossible to enforce.

[chuggman]

That is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

He's essentially saying word-of-mouth should be illegal on the internet, which will cave in the attendance on all online news sources, be they professional or conglomerates. No way, no how, would that ever be constitutionally sound, not to mention it'd be impossible to enforce.

Definitely Retarded and impossible to enforce. Who gives these people law degrees anyway? There is no common sense in any of that logic in it whatsoever... He must be getting big bucks from some news organization or something.