I picked up this story through Twitter last night:
Posting a link to a news story from Ireland might prove to be an expensive business.
According to this site (hat tip Fark) a group of Irish newspapers have decided that the way to make cash from the web is to bill anyone who links to one of their stories.
The National Newspapers of Ireland group has adopted a new licensing scheme where it expects websites to pay to link to one of its members….
And it goes on from there. Unsurprisingly, there is so many things wrong with this idea it’s quite hysterical. And tragic, for an industry already in trouble. Basically, the idea is that these Irish newspapers have already clamped down successfully on anyone daring to excerpt any amount from their articles with the link (like Google News… bye bye fair use) and are now targeting the very act of linking to an article at all. Claiming this is somehow copyright infringement.
My goodness. Sounds self-defeating, positively inane, and completely geared towards making yourself irrelevant, right? Well, I decided to look into this further and hunted down the group’s website, and found this post from them on the topic (oh, a link, hope that doesn’t get me in trouble!).
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