Intellectual Property Law

Posner Proposal to Save Newspapers: Prohibit Linking/Paraphrasing

By Tim Feathers

Judge Richard Posner of the U.S.Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (and renown legal scholar and blogger) has recently proposed a solution to the decline of newspapers in the U.S. - change the law (specifically copyright law) to prohibit linking, copying small parts of news articles, and paraphrasing online. Such an approach would prohibit me from inserting the following excerpt from Posners blog:

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.

And from sharing this tidbit from the article where this first came to my attention (MediaShift):

As newsroom staffs continue to shrink and newspapers go out of business at an alarming rate, the difficulty newspapers have experienced in gaining economic traction online has been blamed on blogs and websites that link to content on newspaper sites. According to some, this kind of "free riding" is responsible at least in part for the distress in which newspapers find themselves. A number of proposals have surfaced, in the U.S. and abroad, to change the law to "even the playing field" between new media and old.

Intriguing thought.  With such a law, this post certainly would have been written differently, and MediaShift and the Becker/Posner Blog would not have links back to them.  You would have been stuck reading my average prose instead if the eloquent and succinct blurbs from the professionals.  And many blogs would certainly go away.  Lots of my favorites really are just aggregators of new and developments just with a little of the author's commentary or take on the matter.  Of course the best have lots of original content, like the Becker/Posner Blog.  New models are emerging though.   

Track the developments here:

Newspaper Death Watch 

Why Newspapers are Doomed to Fail 

The Sky is Falling on the Newspaper Industry

Full post as published by The TechKnowledgy Blog on July 23, 2009 (boomark / email).