United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago Judge Richard Posner has suggested that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed. The suggestion was offered as a possible way to stem the newspaper financial decline.
Though many will find the suggestion odd, and others will cringe at the potential implications for many other Web applications, the concept illustrates just how disrupted content ecosystems now are becoming.
Ignore some obvious and glaring questions about abridgements of free speech rights. Ignore the essential silliness of banning the equivalent of footnotes.
Ignore the analogy to efforts other content owners once made--seriously--to bar the use of VCRs, or to tax sales of blank tape. Ignore damage to "fair use" concepts.
Focus simply on what the suggestion implies about business ecosystem disruption. As in the past, new media are disrupting older media. And as has been the case in the past, some suggest ways of restricting new media to protect the old.
It won't workIt's just silliness.
1 comment:
That is too funny. So let us kill the foundation of the web to remedy one industry's failure to see the sign-o-the-times
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