How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
The newspaper-revenue debate had already cycled through micropayment proposals and demands that ad networks compensate publishers for content they distribute. Earlier coverage also contested the premise that Google’s referrals amount to taking newspaper content.
Posner’s proposal takes that conflict beyond payment models: it treats the link itself as the point at which copyright control could be asserted. That runs against the earlier Belgian dispute, where publishers were ordered to stop Google from sending them traffic.
First-order effects
- Posner’s proposal puts Google and newspaper publishers on opposing sides of a copyright question that reaches the basic mechanism by which search directs readers to news sites.
- For publishers, it shifts the rescue debate from charging for articles or advertising to controlling whether third parties may point readers to copyrighted reporting.
Second-order effects
- Search engines would face a choice between licensing news links or reducing links to newspaper material, making publisher referral traffic a bargaining issue rather than an editorial-discovery feature.
- Ad networks and publisher groups advocating payment for distributed content gain a more expansive legal theory: compensation could be sought at the linking layer, not only around copied material.
Third-order effects
- If policymakers adopt the premise that links require copyright permission, the open-web convention of freely linking to public pages would give way to a rights-clearing system shaped by large publishers and dominant search platforms.
- The dispute signals a broader effort to use copyright rules as a newspaper-business remedy, even where the proposed restriction could also limit the audience publishers receive from search.
The trend: Newspaper publishers’ search for digital revenue is pushing the fight from article monetization toward control over the pathways that deliver online traffic.