First, kill the lawyers – before they kill the news

buzzmachine via instapundit ^ | 6/28/09 | Jeff Jarvis

[shove_it]

Following the frighteningly dangerous thinking of Judge Richard Posner – proposing rewriting copyright law to outlaw linking to and summarizing (aka talking about) news stories – now we have two more lemming lawyers following him off the cliff in a column written by the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Connie Schultz.

First note well that Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown as she calls on her newspapers and employer (my former employer, Advance Publications) and fellow columnists to influence Congress to remake copyright. She should be registered as a lobbyist. No joke.

Schultz says that David Marburger, an alleged First Amendment attorney for her paper, and his economics-professor brother, Daniel, have concocted their own dangerous thinking, proposing the copyright law be changed to insist that a newspaper’s story should appear only on its own web site for the first 24 hours before it can be aggregated or retold.

Incredible. So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with a Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours. A First Amendment lawyer said this.

[...]

[Jagdgewehr]

Death throes of a bygone medium.

[Dr. Sivana]

And how do they propose to make this stick with the UK Daily Mail, or Pravda.ru for that matter?

They can’t even keep first run movies off of bit-torrents.

[Tanniker Smith]

So then every teacher that assigns their class a “current events” assignment would be in violating of this law?

[OneWingedShark]

>So then every teacher that assigns their class a “current events” assignment would be in violating of this law?

Interesting point.

[Mr. K]

how long will it be before reading the daily propoganda- i mean newspaper is required in each school each morning?