Richard Posner Proposes Link Ban
Richard Posner’s sense of pragmatism seems to have entirely escaped him as he offered up this bizarre suggestion last week about how to maintain the financial viability of newsgathering:
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.
This just seems to totally misunderstand the relationship between the linked and the linker. In my years of blogging, I have never once heard the author of an article or the editor of a publication complain to me about having linked to an article. By contrast, on a daily basis authors and editors ask me to link to their articles. This is because having published the article on the World Wide Web, the authors and editors in question want people to read the articles. If they didn’t want to get links, they wouldn’t put the article online. If they put the article online, they want to get links. And certainly if any publication were to request that I stop linking to or otherwise mentioning their content, I would be happy to grant that request without any legal coercion.
Paraphrase is a somewhat different manner, but attempting to ban it would be wildly impractical. The Posner proposal would make it illegal for me to debate the merits of Posner’s argument without first securing Posner’s specific approval. Online dialogue about political topics would grind to a halt. It would become impossible to review movies, recommend TV shows, praise songs, etc.
64 Responses to “Richard Posner Proposes Link Ban”
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June 30th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Yep. This is a monumentally dumb idea. Staggeringly, colossally dumb.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
In any case, it is relatively easy to prevent or limit incoming links by technical means. You can read the Referer header and display an error message if the visitor came via an (unauthorized) link. Does any newspaper actually do this?
June 30th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Online content providers can put content behind a subscription firewall if they want to, as the Wall Street Journal does, and as the NY Times did for some years. And people following links would run into the firewall.
But banning the links themselves is a really stupid suggestion – and it might even be a violation of the First Amendment. On what basis can they deny anyone the right to type, “this piece of stupidity is available at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/06/the_future_of_n.html if you have permission to access that page” ?
June 30th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
The New York Times can do this RIGHT NOW without any change in copyright: don’t have permanent URLs for articles. The user goes to nytimes.com and the URLs they are given are generated specifically for them. Email it to someone and it won’t work. Paste it into a webpage, and it won’t work.
This has been possible since, approximately, forever. No one does it because it’s idiotic.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Maybe it was Vladimir Posner, and not Richard.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
What’s especially odd is that Judge Posner works in the field that invented the concept of cross-linking. The common law is based on the idea that a legal opinion is more legitimate if it cites a prior legal opinion. Every judge wants to write something that gets cited.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I still don’t understand why web ads don’t generate more revenue. (I understand why classified print advertising is getting beat up by web competitors, but I’m talking about plain old ROP print ads and their web equivalents). Has anybody ever identified the reason why advertisers aren’t keener on paying for cyber eyeballs? If I’m not mistaken a lot of newspapers claim — not implausibly — that their total readership — including their web versions — is greater than ever before. One would think this would have translated into a rosier scenario for newspapers by now.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
in the spirit of Richard Posner i didn’t click through to read his article (link? what? where?) or even read the summary you excerpted. but i have to image the article is written in lime green jokerman font with a black background and tons of animated gif icons and is called “RICHARD POSNER’s HOW-TO GUIDE FOR INTERNETWEB WRITINGS AND VIEWINGS CIRCA 1994″
also, this dude must seriously hate RSS.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
There was a case a few years back where an online service provider of some sort (online travel agent, maybe?) made use of another’s service by offering links through to the second’s pages that didn’t require you to start at the second provider’s homepage and format your request using their interface. The second service provider sued the first one, basically saying that linking to their content pages rather than to their homepage was in some way an infringement.
As you might be able to guess from the incredible vagueness of this comment, I don’t recall how the case turned out.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
“The Posner proposal would make it illegal for me to debate the merits of Posner’s argument without first securing Posner’s specific approval.”
Well, of course, it would do no such thing. You could still do nearly all what you have done here: reproduce a small part of the article you are discussing (within the terms of “fair use”) and discuss it. You just wouldn’t be able to link to the entire article, but then, to do nearly all of what you have done here, you don’t need to.
I’m not saying that Posner’s idea is a good one, but your statement that if it were in effect, you wouldn’t be able to even talk about it without his prior approval is simply incorrect.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Bingo. Links are, by definition, good because they bring eyes to your advertisers’ ads!
Now, there’s a very weird problem wherein ads on paper, TV, or radio are able to charge much more for their viewings than ads on the web. But as far as I can tell, there’s no sane reason why other than founders’ effect. That is, when the web was founded, people gave away ad space for basically free and so everybody thinks “tv ads expensive and good, web ads, cheap and sucky!”
I hope that changes in the next 10 years. But the unwillingness of Times advertisers to pay as much for eyes on the web as eyes on paper is the central problem. The problem sure as hell isn’t the FREE and voluntary efforts of thousands of bloggers to direct their readers’ eyes to NYT advertisers.
This makes me think Posner is an idiot.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Articles like these are nothing but cover for the true issue: the riff raff now has a voice.
For … well, nearly ever, a certain, select group of individuals have served as the gatekeepers of information. Whether priests in ancient times (and in the GOP’s wet dream of current-day America), kings and queens in the middle ages, and newspapers in most of 20th century America, there have been those who told others what to think, and those who were supposed to treat those gatekeepers as authoritative sources, regardless of their actual knowledge on the subject, or the truth of their reports.
Now that the Web has created a place where actual experts can state their opinions — and where non-experts can as well, with varying degrees of success — those gatekeepers are afraid. They can see their own demise as people realize they weren’t authoritative, nor were they always telling the truth.
How else to explain the whole Pitney-asked-a-good-question-but-for-the-HuffPost flap? It’s not that Obama’s team let Nico know he’d be called on — it’s that Nico was called on at all.
So what do they do? They claim such places hurt their bottom line and blame their own business failures (e.g. the loss of classified revenues to online services like Craigslist) on those who **gasp** encourage others to read that linked-to content!
And that’s what’s so stunning — the Posner plan would make things worse for traditional media, not better. Yet he — and others — are more willing to protect their place of alleged authority than explore the opportunities online discussion, linking, etc., are providing.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
John Doherty–
No, Matt could not “reproduce a small part of the article” since that would, under Posner’s plan, be illegal without the copyright holder’s consent.
From the actual article:
I see what you’re getting at, but think you’re missing the point: while some may read a blog post without following the supporting links, many of us read the original source(s) to make sure the blog post is accurate.
Posner’s proposal would eliminate that possibility and, thus, make blogging less about actual ideas and discussion, and more about baseless opinions based on nothing more than an author’s word.
There’s also the issue with who asks for and receives permission to use content. Only select places would probably get it, which would kill the sites of independent bloggers who lack that access.
Overall, just a stupid idea by Posner.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Yes, which is why Posner is an idiot who’s only concerned with gaining and advantage in time or space over a fixed supply so that he can exploit it.
Understanding demand would take work.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Precisely what one would expect from a model that seeks to use the subsidy of law to prop up privilege and property. Posner is obsessed with the possession of a finite thing, never imagining that, by shutting down processes he doesn’t understand, he’d be killing the golden goose.
Paradigmatic changes are generational ones. People like Posner will just have to die before their dead ideas stop wasting our time.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
all links would look like this [========]
June 30th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
It’s the war of intellectual property versus intellectual ability. Posner wants to turn back the clock and yet here we are, using the very technology that makes that laughable.
I can understand why someone who was born in 1939 might not understand, or have the energy to learn about, new ways of making money with new technologies. But to use or advocate their privilege to protect a dead business model at the expense of new and productive opportunities and producers sounds like the last few years of the Soviet Union.
The New York Times didn’t just sell subscriptions, it sold its cache. Bloggers didn’t steal the NYT’s cache, the NYT pissed it away. Bloggers build cache and then sell books, advertising, etc., while the centralized, old, top-heavy news agencies look on in horror and demand government intervention in vain.
Erich Honecker says “open fire!”
June 30th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
You can’t statutorily forbid people to paraphrase a New York Times article — at least not without repealing the First Amendment first.
Seriously, can you imagine? “NYT reports Al Franken won in the MN Supreme Court!” And then you get served for copyright infringement? Give me a break.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Copyrighting ideas? Posner’s beyond dumb and well into pernicious.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
It’s possible Posner is just confused about terms here, he seems to think “linking” would somehow violate the IP of the author. My guess is that he’s invisioning some sort of displaying of materials from another web page on yours such that you access the content from webpage X (author’s page), but see the advertisements and other backgroud from page Y (free rider’s page).
June 30th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
That’s a good point Jasper.
Web ads are certainly more useful than paper ads. You can link right to the merchant with a web ad, and put the customer in a position to pay money almost instantly. It’s almost inconceivable that a paper ad could be more expensive.
I wonder if print news is getting killed because of lost classified ads. In the old days, people would buy newspapers for the classifieds. That’s advertising that is aimed directly at a motivated audience. Those 2 lines of “2BR furn. $500/mo 555-1234″ brought in more money inch for inch than the full page bra ads.
Blogs aren’t killing those classifieds, apartment finders, real estate web sites, craigslist are the culprits, and no protection for a reporter’s story will change that.
Journalists are finding out they were being subsidized by classifieds. They were an auxiliary product made profitable because the vehicle was already there.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Sometimes it’s necessary to delicately point out that Judge Posner is a man of admirably polymathic interests, but that he is, sometimes regrettably, not a man of coextensively polymathic knowledge or aptitude.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
@Jasper/anon/njorl.
The reason web ads don’t generate more revenue is that they are far more finely trackable and there’s a ton of inventory. In the newspaper world there was limited inventory for your ads. And not all of them are as trackable as online ads. The combination of fine tracking/targeting, and large inventory has meant that web ads sell for a fraction of their offline counterparts.
Companies such as the one I work for write a lot of technology to ensure that advertisers pay exactly what each impression/click is worth to them, with a lot of inventory out there, it ensures that we don’t have to pay all that much.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Why limit this to online interactions? Let’s ban everyone from referring to or casually summarizing news pieces in their face-to-face meetings, telephone conversations and correspondence, surely that will revive the finances of the news business!
June 30th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Years ago I spent a year working in the business office of the Seattle Times. This was ca. 1989 and before the web took hold.
As I remember, the display ads inside the paper itself were really a pretty minor percentage of the paper’s revenue. Classified ads were bigger. But bigger still were the pre-printed inserts…all the crap that falls out of the paper on Sundays and to a lesser extent on Mondays. Those were the real revenue engine for the paper. And they didn’t even print the stuff themselves. It just arrived via semi-truck and the Times presses inserted it into the paper.
The web can duplicate all the display ads inside the paper quite nicely. But they still haven’t really figured out how to wrap a web site around 60 pages of Best Buy and Target ads and coupons.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Mark D. -
John Doherty–
No, Matt could not “reproduce a small part of the article” since that would, under Posner’s plan, be illegal without the copyright holder’s consent.
Okay, if Posner’s proposal is assumed to trump traditional fair use, then I think that puts it into the realm of a pure thought experiment.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Bill Buckley lives!
Actually, I think Posner is trying to say, with his intertubes-level understanding of the Web, that the New York Times should be permitted to block people from reading its articles without paying. I think he’d be OK with, perhaps, a system by which you or I could link to an article, but clickers of said link could read only the first paragraph without plunking their cash down.
Uh, Dick — that is soooo 2003! That’s precisely the model that failed and drove us into this mess. But in any event, there’s no need for new legislation; the NYT already has the legal and technological ability to do just what you seem to prescribe. The trouble is, they don’t want to.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
You read this stuff by Posner, who is considered among the most important and influential jurists of the past 20 years or so, and you are just completely baffled that he has the enormous power that he does.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
What Posner is missing is that copyrights are dying. The project to make money out of everything is dying. Everything isn’t a market. Few things can be operated under market principals and principals have almost nothing to do with markets. Markets are about power.
Newspapers were money making because of the medium. The medium is currently redundant to the point that it is superfluous because the content is almost worthless, in a monetary sense. The old Wired ‘information wants to be free’ is partly right or maybe it’s that it was more right than they realized. Information can’t well be priced and sold.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
The Internet is the great leveller. It has reduced the barrier to entry into publishing, if by publishing we mean getting information to readers anywhere. So the old empires are crumbling. Posner seeks a way to rebuild those walls.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Matt, The fact that writers and editors want you to link to their work is understandable: they write and edit for a living and are already being paid by their publishers.
Posner’s idea here is from a publisher’s point of view. In order to keep paying those writers and editors, SOMETHING has to be figured out. His is an attempt to figure out how to keep the world of reportage alive. Cuz it’s dying.
What the apparently very young posters in this comment section fail to understand about what they hilariously call “the gatekeepers” is that the information they provide costs money to gather, assimilate, write about and publish. The accessibility of the net does not mean that good information is instantly accessible.
The gathering, assimilation, writing about and publishing of information is called journalism, and it is currently dying. There are attractions about the new world, but the reach and depth of ACTUAL reporting are in serious decline. What do these posters plan to do about that? Twitter won’t suffice.
Matt, I do consider you a journalist, but you are not a reporter — and reporters is what it takes. Reporters need to be paid, as do editors and even publishers.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
JM, do you mean cache, i.e. something stored, or cachet, i.e. prestige?
But on to the main point:
We’re always told that we can’t reproduce copyrighted material on another site, that if we’d like others to read it, we should link to it. Now it may be that we can’t?
I’m sure that writers of Web content want to be linked to and read, but publishers’ motives are often different. You’ve noticed how ads are becoming ever more intrusive? Advertisers, and publishers who depend on them, don’t want you to go directly to your destination. They want to sidetrack you first.
For a similar reason, adult college graduates can find it very difficult to register for a college course. Professors may love to have intellectually serious adults in their classes, but they don’t make the rules. Administrators do.
I’m amazed that anyone would seriously suggest a link ban. Probably 99% of the websites I visit and enjoy I’ve discovered through links. That’s why it’s called the World Wide Web.
But Matt, and Mark D., you’re both on to something. Judge Posner reminds me of celebrities who won’t let anyone interview them without first agreeing to say only good things. Can’t even paraphrase? Can’t challenge an author’s ideas because the copyright holder won’t let me say what those ideas are? I can just imagine the exchange:
“Your criticism of Joe Blow is unfair.”
“No, it isn’t. Joe Blow said that _____ is a bad idea because _____.”
At this point, there is either a cease-and-desist letter, or the conversation goes further:
“Joe Blow said nothing of the sort.”
“Yes he did; he said that _____ _____ _____.”
Then comes the cease-and-desist letter.
Farewell to freedom.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
MinBK, I’m 61.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
You got a really useful blog I have been here reading for about an hour. I am a newbee and your success is very much an inspiration for me. Feel free to check out my sitemortgage broker when you got time.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
What’s amazing is that Posner is a respected federal appeals court judge, and I can’t see any way a law that bans people from paraphrasing what someone has said could possibly be consistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution (even assuming that a ban on links could be).
June 30th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I keep trying to bail Posner out by finding some way this could’ve been intended as a reductio, but no: it’s just fucking stupid.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
If only for MinBK’s benefit, it’s worth pointing out that whatever monetizing scheme you might be thinking of implementing on the web will require people to come visit your site. That’s precisely what linking does; it drives traffic to your site. Publishers banning other sites from linking to their stuff would be like restaurants banning hotels from directing customers to their doorsteps.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:27 am
I just posted a comment on TechCrunch, using the same screen name, in case anyone is interested.
I also e-mailed the site owner urging them to watch out for comment spam.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:31 am
I keep trying to bail Posner out by finding some way this could’ve been intended as a reductio, but no: it’s just fucking stupid.
It does seem like a reductio ad absurdum exercise, because Posner is known for pragmatism and ability to catch up with the changing times (blogging judge, prolific writer).
July 1st, 2009 at 12:56 am
…Posner proposes the Harrison Bergeron method of making newspapers competitive: hobble the internet to make it more like the inferior print model. Brilliant. Idiot.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:06 am
As other people have pointed out, if any company wanted to do what Posner is suggesting, it already could. The fact that it isn’t suggests that it either hasn’t considered it or has considered it and doesn’t think it will work.
At least for the time being, there seems to be two options for organizations with extensive costs that are no longer supported by old methods, such as print. Either they figure out some way to switch to a model that supports their costs while they transition to whatever means of communication awaits, like going from a print and online model to an online only model, or they find some means of subsidizing their current model. For the latter, I’m thinking of Kaplan testing services for The Washington Post and/or NewsCorp/Fox for The Wall Street Journal. That’s possible for a company like The New York Times, but the former seems more likely.
I really do think people are short changing some sort of charge for content. As other people have demonstrated, assuming a major site like nytimes.com has a couple of million subscribers who are willing to pay a small amount for access each month, a major pile of cash is being left on the table by not charging. Let’s say that, in addition to whatever print subscribers who would probably have free access to the site, The Times could get two million people to pay what amounts to 50 cents a day. Assuming that whatever drop in advertising revenue due to overall volume could be made up for with quality of demographic to even out, The Times could earn $365 million a year. Even if it was only half that, the paper would almost certainly be in good shape. And if it was pulling in so much extra money, once it settled its debts and other obligations, the organization could use the money to…expand the news gathering operations. It could become a truly national paper and start covering more and more areas to the point of where it would become a default option for information, even more than it is now.
I use The Times in this scenario because it seems like the most relevant example. However, I think the same sort of solutions apply to similar organizations.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:12 am
Gee, I hope it is. If we’d all missed the point, I’d be embarrassed for myself and the rest of us, but ultimately I’d be relieved.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:33 am
Where was I today, I thought I was here, I can’t remember, but every time my cursor wandered toward the right hand corner of my screen a lady jumped out and started shouting something unintelligible. It happened repeatedly and it kept scaring the crap out me. I have no idea what she was advertising because I kept panicking and canceling the window. To stop the noise.
I wish I could find her again. What the hell WAS she advertising?
It is a crazy game, advertising. Half of my favorite TV commercials I have no idea what they are for. Like the one where the squirrel jumps out into the path of an oncoming car. All the animals in forest start screaming in terror. The last little creature, a grasshopper, screams “peeeeeeep.”
It make me laugh every time. But I have no clue what is being advertised. It could be for the brilliantly handling car, which avoids the squirrel, it might for insurance, or it could be for the tires, traction when you need it. The only thing I know for sure is it was not advertising Ranger Rick magazine. I would remember that.
I love the commercial, but they can’t make money off of me because I don’t know who to give it to. Hell, I can’t even refer other people to the product.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:17 am
What does that have to do with Judge Posner’s modest proposal?
July 1st, 2009 at 4:49 am
Similar lines of reasoning to Posner’s have been adopted by a number of people recently.
What Posner is essentially suggesting is that the government destroy the world wide web at great expense because newspapers did better without it. Posner would like to blame people reading paraphrases of online articles for print’s failing business, but all newspapers have to do to stop any lost business is to stop offering their articles online. They don’t do this because they know they’d be doing even worse if they weren’t providing free web access to their articles.
It is not the government’s job to enforce WaPo’s market share.
July 1st, 2009 at 6:07 am
Malcolm Gladwell has a great critique of the notion that “information wants to be free” at
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell
July 1st, 2009 at 8:40 am
> I still don’t understand why web ads don’t
> generate more revenue.
Coremetrics and its competitors. With such tools, it became possible to measure the exact effectiveness of web advertising. Advertisers analyzed the measurements and came to the correct conclusion that web advertising isn’t very effective.
What they failed to do is to draw the next logical conclusion: that NO FORM of advertising is very effective. That would have created such cognitive dissonance that Madison Avenue would have collapsed into a smoking crater. So instead everyone decided to close their eyes and pretend that (1) traditional, unmeasured advertising channels were and still are effective (2) non-traditional, web-based, measured advertising channels are not effective.
Cranky
July 1st, 2009 at 9:55 am
I know Posner is one of those people all Serious Liberals are supposed to admire, but I’ve seen him flake out this way more than once and it raises a lot of questions about him.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Interestingly, I’m just finishing Posner’s new book a failure of capitalism. I’m an admirer of the Judge basically and he tells the meltdown story very clearly but many of his conclusions are very shaky intellectually. Rather like this piece he ignoress the real world completely. Very odd.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:48 am
The really ridiculous aspect of Posner’s ridiculous idea is that search engines would be utterly devastated. Imagine Google having to get permission from each and every one of the copyright holders that came up on every search. It frightens me to imagine that this lack of serious consideration could be a regular part of his rulings from the bench.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:05 am
In what sense is linking “free-riding”? I suppose that by referencing an article in, and linking to, the New York Times you are in some sense free-riding on the reputation and authority of the New York Times. But if there were no links wouldn’t people just do the exact same thing with a footnote? Or does he want to ban footnotes, too?
July 1st, 2009 at 11:06 am
> I still don’t understand why web ads don’t
> generate more revenue.
The answer in my case is Firefox + AdBlocker.
I haven’t seen an ad in years. Between this and DVR, I’m beginning to think it will get worse before it gets better.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:08 am
I still don’t understand why web ads don’t generate more revenue. (I understand why classified print advertising is getting beat up by web competitors, but I’m talking about plain old ROP print ads and their web equivalents). Has anybody ever identified the reason why advertisers aren’t keener on paying for cyber eyeballs? If I’m not mistaken a lot of newspapers claim — not implausibly — that their total readership — including their web versions — is greater than ever before. One would think this would have translated into a rosier scenario for newspapers by now.
My understanding (I guess I’m saying the same thing as justlanded, but in broader terms) of the problem is that advertisers don’t want to pay for cyber eyeballs on the Web site where their ad appears. Instead, they want to pay for clickthroughs – people who click the link their ad is.
The advertisement in the morning newspaper earns the newspaper company a dollar per paper printed or something like that, but the advertisement on the Web site earns the newspaper company a dollar per person who goes to the Web site, isn’t using an ad-blocker addon, notices the ad, doesn’t get pissed off by its volume or popup window or whatever, decides they want to know more about the product or service right now, and decides that the best way to find out more is to click on the ad.
This, obviously, is very bad for the newspaper publisher. It’s good business on the advertiser’s part in the short term, but it seems to me like killing the goose that lays the golden egg because it ignores the indirect benefits of advertising. In addition to getting people to buy the actual product, some ads make people talk, they keep the product in front of peoples’ minds for when they next need that kind of thing, etc. Intangibles like that aren’t captured by clickthroughs.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:43 am
Publishers may have different interests than authors, but they should still want to be linked to. I’m never going to read Vanity Fair on my own, but if Andrew Sullivan mentions a great article about Sarah Palin and links to it, I may follow that link and read several pages on the site (all of which have ads on them). If he only mentions the article without the link, I’m much less likely to track down the article myself.
There has been a change in the way people approach advertising. Lots of people used to buy the newspaper (in large part) in order to get the ads — the coupons and sale circulars and mini-catalogs from large retailers. Some people still do — my cousin never reads the paper, but she sits down with the Sunday paper every weekend to go through the ad inserts to figure out where she might find the best bargain on clothes for her kids. But there’s nothing at all similar with online content — none of the web sites that attempt to aggregate info from several different retailers seem to have had much success. And, as noted, those ad inserts were (are) the largest part of a newspaper’s ad revenue.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:30 pm
>I still don’t understand why web ads don’t generate
>more revenue.
It’s because traditional media has been overcharging for ads since forever. There’s an old joke where a business exec says, “I know half my advertising budget is being wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
With print and broadcast media, it is extremely difficult to determine which ads are effective. Usually, the best one can do is get a rough idea from circulation figures/ratings how many people have seen the ad. This tends to be a larger number than those who actually notice and act on the ad.
On the other hand, web ads with their charges based on number of clicks provide instant feedback on the effectiveness of the ad. The advertiser can get more bang for the buck and actually spend less on advertising overall, while achieving the same effect. The pricing of web ads comes closer to reflecting the true economic value of advertising than that of traditional media.
Additionally, there is a class of ads where the advertiser just wants people to see the ad. They don’t care about click-throughs or responses–they just want to raise/maintain brand awareness by getting large numbers of eyeballs on the ad. These essentially get a free ride on the web. For this type of ad, traditional media ad pricing probably reflects the true economic value.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Pender @ 18 above wrote:
Seriously, can you imagine? “NYT reports Al Franken won in the MN Supreme Court!” And then you get served for copyright infringement? Give me a break.
But couldn’t you write, “I read in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/etc.etc) thawt Al Franken won in the MN Supreme Court.” Takes care of both the paraphrase problem and the link problem. Yes, you have to copy & paste, rather than just click, but it’s only a mild work around. And defeats Posner’s proposal.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Maybe he was working at his government office when he thought of this.. How does that work anyway. Federal judge using federal property to work on private things.
July 1st, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Honestly, I feel betrayed by the professional journalists of the world. I knew and a lot of other people knew that the War in Iraq was B.S. and that Bush was just making up a justification. Yet the print media was largely silent on this topic. At the same time internet was on fire about it. If the internet were taken as seriously as print media, maybe we wouldn’t have had a war.
Unfortunately, that is not the world we are living in. A lot of innocent people are dead because of the timidness and “objectivity” of professional journalists. I don’t think I’m going to feel inclined to forgive professional journalists any time soon and I don’t think I’m going to support the government doing them any favors.
Professional journalists are about as useful these days as professional encyclopedia writers
July 1st, 2009 at 3:29 pm
[...] prompted Posner last week to suggest banning linking to copyrighted material—a suggestion slapped down yesterday by [...]
July 1st, 2009 at 4:57 pm
All I can say is vote no on 10-289!
July 1st, 2009 at 5:50 pm
If a news site was able to prevent (assuming they could do this effectively) people from linking to it, then their Google rank would eventually fall through the floor, i.e., no one would be able to search their content! Ha!
#2 (@Guan Yang): The referer header is very easy to forge. If this idea were to ever become popular, it wouldn’t take long for browser plugins, etc., to solve this issue. Also, it would be trivial to create a proxy to forge the required header, just the same.
July 2nd, 2009 at 2:38 am
[...] je viens de faire, c’est à dire mettre en lien son billet et en reprendre une partie. Comme le fait remarquer Matthew Yglesias, c’est le genre de réflexion de quelqu’un qui n’a pas l’habitude [...]
July 2nd, 2009 at 2:51 am
Of course, Posner ignores the flip-side of putting the Times on the Web: no need to maintain printing presses, distribution networks, fleets of trucks, giant Manhattan buildings full of reporters, editors, and their associated needs (Janitors, coffee machines, administrative assistants, electric bills, etc. etc.). Would the lack of these very high fixed costs offset the large drop in ad revenue? Of course not. But it would definitely help.
The future is coming, whether Posner wants to pull a music industry jihad on readers and aggregators or not. Might be better to accept it. But hey, I’m a radical.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
[...] Posted by chanders on July 6, 2009 … and also a response to Connie Schultz, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reader rep, and the estimable Judge Richard Posner: [...]