There is a view that “Lawyers ill equipped to advise on intersection of social media and copyright laws, see recent article in the Washington Post by Erick Schonfeld.
I find the views of Judge Richard Posner (Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit) particularly disturbing. His proposal includes rewriting copyright law to outlaw linking to and summarizing news stories. His honour simply does not understand what the impact of a hyperlink is. A well respected lawyer ha may be but he should seek the opinion of someone like myself before going off on such a rant.
I have been in the IT industry for over 25 years, in addition I AM A QUALIFIED LAWYER and and expert in Social Media! So I am ideally qualified to comment about the intersection between IT, Social Media and the law.
I repost here the comment that I have made on Judge Poisner’s blog
I, like you, am concerned about the future of the newspaper industry, but do feel that the decline comes from a failure to adapt to and control associated new technologies to their advantage. This failure is however not a recent one – the writing has been on the wall for the whole industry for a decade now. Technologies such as Social Media are simply accelerating this decline.
I can see the news on Twitter far faster than even the TV can report it. Twitter is like sitting next to an old Reuters news teletype of years gone by. As you correctly point out this is free.
The London Times has had for many years a paid subscription. If you pay your subscription then you can see every article that appears in the print edition plus additional, on-line only materials. This is one model that could be adopted by other newspapers.
Advertisers are currently perplexed about the whole future of advertising, not just the association with the print industry. However providing links to any site should benefit that site, I celebrate as I gain readership on my web-site, and my new readers come from my ability to be found and be relevant on searches. People come back to my site for my opinion (I know because I get thank you notes everyday by Twitter and email).
Your proposal to “Expanding copyright law to bar on-line access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent” is in my humble opinion wrong. Everything I produce is Copyright material – copyright attaches the moment I hit the publish button. If I bared links to my site I would limit traffic, which would not be to my benefit. It is not a case of a website taking a “free ride on other sites”, linking is what drives traffic on the web. Google ranks pages in part because of linkages.
What you are witnessing is the democratisation of news. People have come to understand that when they observe something of significance their opinion is as important as that of a news reporter, even more so if they witnessed the actual event and can update the world through Twitter or other Social Media. They become the REAL reporter. Reuters and the Associated Press can NEVER again become the only professional, non-governmental sources of news and opinion.
As a lawyer I do support copyright law very strongly, as a technologist I support an expansion of access to materials. As an author I support payment for effort made. The fact that material exists on the web does prohibit it from being provided as a cost. Perhaps the subscription model should be considered further for many content providers, including the traditional print media.
Peter B. Giblett. CITP, LLB
Editor – CIO Perspectives
http://cio-perspectives.com/
At the end of the day it is the desire of internet publishers not to pay for material produced for web consumption and the web audience not to pay for access to sites that is limiting the monetization of the web. There is advertising on the web and this site also includes advertising, but I earn very little from that advertising because people who use the web know how to tune-out that advertising.
His Honour Judge Poisner is lacking the understanding of how the web really works, yet he is right to be concerned about copyright, because the web when incorrectly used becomes an avenue for piracy. He needs to understand how the web works and the value of the hyperlink before shooting of his uneducated mouth.
