Let's put the politics aside for a second. Mickey Kaus approvingly links to a Maureen Dowd column, only the link doesn't lead to the New York Times, where Dowd's column has disappeared behind a paid archive, but to the Free Republic, where the full thing is reprinted, copyright be damned. Now, I've got mixed opinions about the copyright law in general, and I'm not a fan of the Times new policy of locking everything up after a week. But this isn't some small blogger sharing a column he liked (and I run across very few blogs that reprint an entire column, or link to unauthorized copies of them) this is a writer at the largest Web magazine on the planet, and an employee of the Washington Post, the major competitor with the Times for the position of the national newspaper, and, not too long ago, the plaintiff (together with the Times) in a lawsuit against the Free Republic for reprinting the entirety of the Post's articles. That's a different kind of copyright evasion, and though it will never be prosecuted, under a strict interpretation of the law, such that is applied to humble bloggers, it's equivalent to the Post reprinting the entirety of Dowd's column within its Op-Ed section. Does the Post's legal counsel know of this? Not that a lawsuit's coming, of course, the big guys never sue the other big guys over this stuff.
And not that Kaus did it as a "The Information Wants To Be Free" ("The Man Can't Stop Our Maureen?") act. He did it to evoke the icky feeling I got in suddenly being in the Free Republic in all liberal readers who unwittingly click on his link. And for the arch-conservative readers, it's there for the same reason he links approvingly to Lucianne Goldberg and Ann Coulter, a way of saying that he agrees with their most extreme comments without actually coming out and saying it. Which is why ultimately I respect Kaus much less than any of them-- he's a passive aggressive little shit.
where's my subway update?
Posted by: me | April 25, 2005 at 05:05 PM
We should be aware of the copyright laws implemented to prevent lawsuits.
Posted by: pinnacle security reviews | February 18, 2011 at 07:31 AM