Save Newspapers by Banning Links?

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Michael
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Someone's got issues with Web 2.0 - hell, with Web 1.0:

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.

That basically guaranteed to finish killing off newspapers - having them drop out of online discussion. It's also an outright rejection of one of the major advantages of online publication - citations that take you straight to the original document.
And why does everything have to be all about newspapers anyway?

Beyond that, extending copyright law to criminalize linking would cripple the entire Web. In all of these debates, newspapers are always placed somehow at the center of the Web, completely ignoring the millions of other sites out there which have nothing to do with news. Yet changes to copyright law to make linking illegal would have much wider, unintended consequences. I can’t believe I even have to explain why this is a bad idea.

Comments

I think Schonfeld is being a bit hard on Posner, who has an excellent judicial record on free speech issues. Posner's discussion is about what would be necessary to save the news gathering apparati of the papers (thus providing the links that online news sources feed on). In my opinion, his blog does not necessarily advocate for this position, but simply illustrates what kind of steps would actually be needed to save newspapers, while pointing out what news gathering would look like without at least several major papers around.

If eventually newspapers vanish, online providers will have higher
advertising revenues (because newspaper advertising will have
disappeared) and may decide to charge for access to their online news,
and so the critical question is whether online advertising revenues
will defray the costly news-gathering expenses incurred at this time by
newspapers. Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely
to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and
subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does
today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web
site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and
free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in
print publication; what is staler than last week's news. 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.
-Richard Posner's blog

Josh Witten | 06/29/09 | 19:32 PM

n my opinion, his blog does not necessarily advocate for this position, but simply illustrates what kind of steps would actually be needed to save newspapers, while pointing out what news gathering would look like without at least several major papers around.

It still sounds to me like he's making a serious suggestion - one that is absurd. I also disagree with his idea that online newspapers support a whole bunch of 'free riding'. Does he consider our commentary here on news and journal articles free riding? Commenting on, and linking to something is not free riding, any more than The New Republic or the National Review is free-riding on the daily newspapers. So I think he has the diagnosis wrong - he seems to think that "paraphrasing copyrighted materials" is a major problem.

On top of that, he appears to think that linking means you bypass having to pay for content, which is obviously wrong: if newspapers don't want you to read their articles without a subscription, then a link is not going to get you past that.

Michael White | 06/30/09 | 16:57 PM

And why does everything have to be all about newspapers anyway?

That's just it. When did newspapers and print media acquire this sort of entitlement thinking from the larger public? I don't recall that first principle in my classes on capitalism.

Hank Campbell | 06/29/09 | 20:45 PM

Should devices like the Kindle ever really catch on like the iPod (perhaps once they drop in price a bit and can store music?), then that could also help "save the newspapers" (the necessity of which is debatable). People would still pay for a subscription, but they would receive instant gratification once the information is printed. Also, printing and circulation costs would drop.

Lauren (not verified) | 06/30/09 | 12:47 PM

Good question. Costs drop but so does advertising. No one pays here to advertise what they pay to advertise on the print version of Nature, for example, even though our metric for performance is a lot easier to know. So how do you pay journalists what they are used to wanting?

I don't think the problem is more than a distribution one and that has nothing to do with online. When I was a kid a kid delivered papers. Now, even if a kid does it in some places, he gets it from Teamsters first and they get paid a lot. I live in the state capitol of the most populous state in the US but I can't get USA Today delivered - they only want to mail it. They are still printing them but when mailing - and the drop in subscriptions they incur because no one wants to read their paper at night if they even check their mail every day - is better than making it easy for people to read your paper, your business has a problem that has nothing to do with online competition.

Like auto unions who insisted janitors needed to make $50 an hour, newspaper people and their unions will discover there are things better than no job at all.

Hank Campbell | 06/30/09 | 13:31 PM

I don't think the problem is more than a distribution one and that has nothing to do with online.

That's my feeling. I'm still willing to pay for good content/reporting that is expensive to produce - if the NY Times or Wall Street Journal wants to charge me a subscription fee, I'll pay it (and in fact I did, back when the NY Times charged for full online access). I have no doubt that many are willing to pay for quality online content - I doubt that Posner's 'free-riders' would out compete online newspapers if all of the major papers started charging for online content.

The problem is that almost all of them make their stuff free now - apparently for awhile they thought the ad revenue would do it. People pay a lot for crappy channels on cable; I think plenty of people would still pay for online news subscriptions, if the major news organizations started charging.

Michael White | 06/30/09 | 17:06 PM

I find that most bloggers don't 'free ride'. They quote a paragraph or so from a newspaper article and provide a link. Links take web traffic to a newspaper, not away from it.

By contrast, I find that most newspapers reporting on science misquote the source and do not provide a link to the original paper. That is both a free ride and a dissemination of error.

Patrick Lockerby | 07/01/09 | 05:48 AM

I am 100% in agreement with you, Patrick. I often make use of news stories or press releases, but always make sure I note the source and provide a link. Sometimes they say it better, or it's just easier to quote. The Web site project I used to work for, Health News Review, considered whether a story relied solely on a press release as one of its criterion for grading a story, and sadly it was not uncommon for newspapers to print verbatim - verbatim - the press release without any attempt at fact checking, sourcing, etc. Partially that can be chalked up to drastically reduced newsroom staff, but I think it's also partially due to laziness and the lack of anyone with health/medical/science credentials on a news staff to take 5 minutes and do some checking. I worked on a paper for a while, so I know the pressure these folks are under, and I do believe that the majority want to do the right thing.

Becky Jungbauer | 07/01/09 | 08:34 AM

We've printed plenty of them verbatim here but we have the luxury of a more targeted audience. MIT, Harvard, etc. have professional staffs writing releases that have no corporate pressure thanks to a university teat - not a great business model for the nation but fine if you can just raise tuition. Their quality is as good as anything rewritten by any magazine or paper, they just lack the critical aspect you want in better papers (though it has often been lacking).

Our audience wants to know first, they aren't really educated by them, so I have no issue using them as filler on slow days. As we continue to grow we will do less and less of those but some of them get popular.

Hank Campbell | 07/01/09 | 09:48 AM

I should clarify - you acknowledge the source and link to the source. I have no problem with that. Many papers, however, don't.

Becky Jungbauer | 07/01/09 | 10:25 AM

Our audience wants to know first, they aren't really educated by them, so I have no issue using them as filler on slow days.

In a way, they're like non-technical abstracts. People can see what's coming out in the journals every week. You've got to read with a critical eye, but then again, that's true of abstracts as well.

Michael White | 07/01/09 | 12:20 PM

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