Comments on: Justice Richard Posner’s Copyright Law No One Can Talk About (Or Link To)

By: Fiar

Fiar — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:47:38 +0000

Just how exactly would you know if someone is paraphrasing a story? You would have to know what source is being paraphrased, and if I don’t link to that source, which I wouldn’t be able to do anyway, then who is going to know. The whole thing is just stupid, but sadly, it is the natural and predictable outcome of believing in such restrictions on free speech as “Intellectual Property” and “Copyrights” in the first place. Which is exactly what copyright is. You can’t own thought. That’s preposterous.

How would such a ruling affect parody and satire?

By: Dape

Dape — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:52:48 +0000

Its seems a bit ridiculous to try and implement this it would be impossible to police. It really brings to light the question, who are the real pirates. “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.” via Burroughs ups! regards Dape.

By: Erika

Erika — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:58:18 +0000

Twitter doesn’t have enough users for it to move THAT fast and be THAT relevant, believe it or not. We’d either be underestimating the power of the search engine, blog, and internet or overestimating how many people actually live by Twitter enough to report that quickly to it.

I really respect the effort to THINK about ways to help protect our print media in their progression toward moving online… but perhaps our justices need to do a little more digging and research involving people who work with THIS for a living every day? Certainly one of us could’ve told him any number of things in Danny’s post.

Great article. Tweeting now!

By: Rocky

Rocky — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:42:47 +0000

I’ve been saying for a while that one of the fundamental challenges that puts the newspaper industry in a tougher spot than the music industry is that while you can copyright an expression of ideas, you can’t copyright the facts.

In the music industry, most of the value is in the expression. In the newspaper industry, it’s in the facts. So this is their solution? Oy.

On the plus side, if this passes we won’t have to put up with all the “news” stories which are just paraphrases of press releases.

By: Dan at Airships.net

Dan at Airships.net — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:01:36 +0000

This proposal would not only cripple newspapers, as Danny persuasively argues, but even more importantly it would chill, if not effectively eliminate, the free speech rights of individual citizens to discuss the issues of the day.

By: Eden

Eden — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:55:54 +0000

Forgetting for a moment how stupid this whole idea is, would it even matter if something like this happened? We have Twitter. Twitter is a conversation and it moves faster than current ‘news sources’ anyway.

By: Aaron Bradley

Aaron Bradley — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:46:27 +0000

Great piece. Not only would the linking prohibition impact newspapers’ ability to research items, but would deprive them of a vitally important revenue source by preventing links to their content, and so curtailing their traffic. This, of course, is at ironic heart of the newspapers’ misguided efforts to prevent “content theft”: Internet traffic to a paper’s website will replace (if it hasn’t already) audited subscribers as the most important revenue stream.