A US Appeals Court Judge has caused quite the stir by suggesting on his blog that linking to or even paraphrasing newspaper content without permission should be outlawed.
Richard Posner, who is also a legal scholar, expressed his feeling that the journalism industry, in which print newspapers have suffered extreme misfortune during this economic crisis, may not recover once the economic crisis is over.
Online journalism, he decreed, has to undergo some sort of change, since clearly giving away their content for free is not helping these newsrooms pay the bills.
With the exponential multiplication of blogs, the Judge explained, it’s all too easy nowadays for bloggers to “create a website and ride on others for free”. This piggybacking is done through linking or paraphrasing the stories that journalists are paid to cover for their news site exclusively.
His suggestion was that any site that wishes to link to or paraphrase a news site’s content must first seek the permission of that news site, or otherwise the act should be considered illegal.
The beginning of 2009, he reasoned, saw newspaper ad revenues drop 30 percent from their level in the first quarter of 2008.
Not long after his proposal was posted, bloggers were decrying the lack of sense in his anti-linking idea (TechCrunch called it the most “jaw-dropping” of the misguided schemes to save newspapers).
Outlawing links to certain websites could have huge implications for search engine algorithms, which largely base their ranking strategy on the number and quality of incoming links. If the algorithms remained as they are now, it would be the news sites that would suffer. If barriers were put up to restrict the links going in to news sites, including the biggest ones like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc., these sites could see a huge demise in their search engine rankings.
That said, there is validity in Posner’s call for some new steps to be taken towards a new model for online journalism. He is not the first to call for such measures – indeed, journalists have been bemoaning the demise of their profession due to powerful news aggregators like Google News.
But restricting linking with laws is an unlikely scenario – who would police these laws? In addition, Google might have something to say about having to adjust its algorithms so that news sites can earn more money (and how they would earn more money from these anti-linking laws is something relatively unclear in Posner’s argument).
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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