Slashdot reports today that,
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.”
This is shocking coming from an otherwise very wise federal judge and philosopher of law.
In effect, Mr. Posner is suggesting that it might be a good idea if we make it illegal to quote someone else’s own words.
Mr. Posner is one of our leading constitutional law scholars and I wouldn’t deign to pretend that I am as knowledgeable as he.
But having said that, I simply cannnot fathom how he 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.
But it won’t, so they won’t.
I hope.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Death of Blogging Part II // Jun 30, 2009 at 4:27 pm
[...] few days ago I
2 Rupert Murdoch CEO Wants to Criminalize Bad Blogging! // Jul 2, 2009 at 4:53 am
[...] recently wrote in Death of Blogging and Death of Blogging II
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