Copywrong
David Post discusses Judge Richard Posner’s musings on the pretty hopeless prospects of the newspaper biz:
[I]f “the newspaper” as a business model fails (because of competition from the free content available on the Net), who will invest the resources required for adequate news-gathering services in the first place? . . .
[Posner's] proposal for reform, however, goes into the “Cure Worse Than Disease” file:
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.
It’s hard for me to summarize why this is so terrible an idea.
But–like online copyright infringement–impossible to resist the temptation to try!
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