Bizarre anti-link theory: Federal judge pandering to newspaper biz?
Does Richard Posner, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, really believe that perhaps you shouldn’t be able to link to a newspaper article without the paper’s permission?
Same for paraphrasing?
Is Posner, once talked up as a possible Supreme Court nominee, just pandering to the newspaper business? Is he looking ahead to the time when the Supreme Court may have another seat to fill. From Judge Posner’s 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 then the nice, polite liberals—I’m an impolite liberal—wonder why so many young people love Ayn Rand and hate governments To hell with fair use and all that. Let’s toss it out to serve special interests that can advance the judge’s career. I lack ESP and can’t say for sure that opportunism is Judge Posner’s reason for writing what he did, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
About Posner’s own politics: Actually his ideology is less liberal than in the past, and in fact he’s been hostile at times to antitrust laws (well, in some ways, that certainly would jibe with his love of big media). Conservatives these days just might be stuck with his being one of them. The positive is that his kooky views on various matters will probably rule him out for the Supreme Court. But a judge can dream, eh?
(Via TechCrunch.)
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