Be worried, very worried, when attorneys supposedly quite familiar with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (free speech, freedom of the press, he right to assembly, the right to petition the government, no prohibition on free exercise of religion) actually propose legally restricting free speech.
First Judge Richard Posner proposes rewriting copyright law to outlaw linking to and summarizing news stories. No summarizing? It's hard to talk about an idea without at least mentioning what the idea is.
Now we have "First Amendment" attorneys seriously proposing that copyright law be changed so that a newspaper’s story could appear only on its own Web site for the first 24 hours before it can be aggregated or retold. So a story about protesters on the streets of Tehran could not be summarized for full 24 hours.
Muddle-headed thinking will not save an old media form that is being supplanted by other new forms. Were it just muddle-headed, it wouldn't be so bad.
It's evil in banal disguise.
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