That Link You Just Posted Could Cost You 300 Euros 227
Nate the greatest writes "Do you like to tweet or share links to interesting news articles? According to a coalition of Irish newspapers, that makes you a pirate. The National Newspapers of Ireland has adopted a new policy. Any website which links to one of the 15 NNI member newspapers will have to pay a minimum of 300 Euros, with the license fee going up if you post more links. Note that this is not a fee to post an excerpt or some punitive measure for the copying of an entire article. No, the NNI wants to charge for links alone. It's almost as if this organization has no idea how the web works. Or maybe they have found an elaborate way to commit suicide."
Here's a link to an article... (Score:1, Interesting)
about the NNI taking this action...
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/1026/1224325733736.html [irishtimes.com]
LOL.
Re:Rubbish - If it's on the web (Score:5, Interesting)
Its definable, not necessarily linkable, beyond the domain name.
Its pretty trivial to make a dynamic website, for the sake of example, moronirishnewspaper.com and all the links on that are random numbers which are mapped to the the real story. Then every minute or whatever add new links and destroy the links that are more than 30 minutes old. So MIN.com/123456.html points to the most recent blarney competition, but in an hour, that URL will be deleted and/or repointed to goatse or whatever instead of the original story.
One amusing thing you can do, if you rotate every minute and keep the last 60 links around for an hour, is trivially analyze how long someone's been on the site and/or how long between clicks. You can also get all "top sekrit" security by obscurity and give different random number links to each subscriber, so if you see a link out in the wild, you know exactly who released it and when and what it was linked to. Other than that, it is a pretty moronic stunt or experiment. Why yes, I have done some pretty bizarre things solely for the F of it in the past 20 years.
Re:Here's a link for all of them (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are you posting links to these jackasses?
Hey, it's a real service to some of us webmasters. We can now add a little routine to our servers that scans everything send, looks for these URLs, and when it finds them, changes them to a random item from a list of URLs. For that list, we need someone to build a site that provides the URLs for things like rickrolls, goatses, etc., and keeps it up to date.
With the help of this little list, we can probably cut way down on their incoming traffic. But we need to pass the word to other webmasters, and bring as many sites into "compliance" as we can manage.
(It might also help if the owners of the sites on this list would send us lists of their main competitors, so we can make "relevant" redirections of the URLs that they don't want us to tell people about.)
Re:NNI's submission to Copyright Review (Score:4, Interesting)
The first two sentences seem aimed at things like The Pirate Bay and other sites linking to illegal copies, which they think should be illegal under some kind of contribution theory. And that you could at least argue, that there's a difference between pointing people to a legal gun shop and your illegal arms dealer friend Tony. Amending the law to say linking is never illegal would be a very strong result, if you're not hosting it you're not liable for it period. It would be very good for everyone casually linking to websites everywhere, but would would enable the business model of 1) Upload content anonymous to hosting sites, 2) Post links to said content on your ad-supported link site, 3) Profit from ad revenue. Not many "???" steps in that plan.
But the last sentence really takes it over the top, they assert the right to control all links pointing to their copyrighted work period and the "infringement" letters go with that definition too. It's like telling a map service that you made ad money on pointing people to our store, so you owe us money. To be illegal under copyright the, the law must be broken somehow because you can't have secondary infringement without a primary infringement. If I point people to your article, you can either choose to provide them a copy - which would be legal - or refuse them a copy - which would be legal. Under no circumstances could this lead to copyright law being violated as anything that happens once people follow the link is under full control of the copyright holder. Arguing otherwise is not just stupidity, but insanity.