Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about Posner's proposed link ban. People want their sites to be linked.

Actually there are people who do not want to be linked, but they can do so pretty easily using technical means, no need to change copyright law. In fact the New York Times used to use links that automatically broke after a few weeks.

But even if they did not, who would if linking to the New York Times was prohibited? Adding links takes effort. I am happy to do so as a courtesy to the authors I reference, but that is really all it is. I am quite happy leaving the links out or linking to another news source.

Traditional news is now a commodity. I can link to hundreds of news articles on the coup in Honduras. The only newspaper content that is not commodified by the Web is opinion - which is the one type of content that the Web model supports effectively.

We need to work out a way for funding primary news gathering, but changing the copyright laws to affect linking is not it.