I'll pay for linking when they pay for my ideas

Judge Posner thinks that we can solve the economics of the media by banning linking:

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.

Hat tip Stowe Boyd for putting me onto this - he notes:

As Erick Schoenfeld points out, Posner never mentions freedom of speech, fair use, or the benefits of linking in the context of open social discourse. He -- as might be expected -- is taking a propertarian approach to this antilinking nonsense: in his mind he is saying, "The newspapers spend a lot of time and money building this content, and then a bunch of freeloaders come along and reference it, and then others don't have to visit the original news stories! How dare them! How can the newspapers survive if people start writing about what they have written?

Its worse than that - I've seen more than one newspaper journalist use stuff that I've written or twittered about, and I've used their stuff. The difference is I acknowledge them and link to it, and many of them don't. I have drawn this dynamic above.

One is a mark of respect and legal (I am allowed to take samples of others' work for comment), the other is a mark of disdain and possibly illegal, just bloody costly and probably impossible for me to enforce. Odd that the one that is legal and marking respect is the one that should be banned.

Update - really nice analysis by Josh Young using Game Theory and Coase's Laws:

First, big news companies might rejoice, but their joy would be short-lived. For soon, all across the interwebs, on smaller websites and services, announcements would begin to pop up. Sites like TechCrunch and Talking Points Memo, to name just a couple, would start screaming as loudly as they can, “Please! Link here. Have your discourse about my content if you can’t have it about theirs! We hereby offer blanket permission to link and to paraphrase to anyone and everyone.”

In other words, as George Frink wrote on twitter, the plan “would give enormous competitive advantage to sources granting blanket copyright permission & for all fair-use links.”

As Posner’s beloved Coase theorem holds, “bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property rights.” Now, there are important caveats like zero transactions costs, but again from wikipedia: “While the exact definition of the Coase theorem remains unsettled, there are two issues or claims within the theorem: the results will be efficient and the results in terms of resource allocation will be the same regardless of initial assignments of rights/liabilities.”

So then, of course, medium-sized sites would look in envy at smaller sites’ success. It wouldn’t be long before they too joined in on the fun, grabbing traffic that their bigger, perhaps more prestigious news companies formerly lapped up.

As he notes, free links are the Nash Equilibrium......