Richard Posner: Save Newspapers by Banning Hyperlinks

In what can only be termed the nadir of the debate over how to save newspapers, Judge Richard Posner, generally considered one of the greatest minds of his generation, has advocated banning hyperlinks to copyrighted materials:

Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better. Yet in a blog post last week on the future of newspapers, he concludes there may be only one way to save the industry:

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 . . .

Erick Schonfeld provides a very thorough explanation for why this makes no sense whatsoever, although, admittedly, what he says will probably be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Web.

So now we're at the point where we need to radically reconceive fair use in order to prop up the dying newspaper industry . . .