Two posts I made in a discussion on traditional newspapers’ employees’ and investors’ confusion around linking vs. copying, the nature of the web and the internet, and copyright law (discussed by Doc Searls here and by Calcanis.com here. The Washington Post story that set off the discussion is entitled Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride, and is bylined: “By Frank Ahrens and Karl Vick, Washington Post Staff Writers, Saturday, April 7, 2007; Page D01″. My replies are here and here.):

This comment from an earlier poster is truly an example of tilting at windmills:

“Google ignores copyright. But it’s not just Google. The entire Web is still set up this way because Congress hasn’t understood the implications yet. Eventually, they will. And this will change with the laws.”

The web is not print, nor is the internet a broadcast medium. The juridical, political and social arenas will have to adjust to this reality. Posting on the web inherently means that one has given away content. There is nothing comparable to the immediacy of the hyperlink in the print world. The primary usefulness, indeed the very definition of the web, stems from linking. Tim Berners Lee, author of http and html, clearly articulated this in _Weaving the Web_, and Zell, the reporters at the Washington Post, and David Lazarus would do well to read Berners Lee’s book.

Linking, of course, is not the only novel aspect of the internet. Tcp/ip also make it so that zero distance exists between hosts, thereby breaking the broadcast model — or, more correctly, making it so that broadcast is but one protocol that fits nicely into the tcp/ip suite.

Again, journalists and investors from the print world do well to dwell extensively on these facts. To take another approach, anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s book, _Imagined Communities_, examines the similarly disruptive character of an earlier innovation: the printing press. I highly recommend it as an excellent primer on what we’re seeing unfolding now.

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I wanted to clarify two things that I said in a post above.

First, I said: “Linking, of course, is not the only novel aspect of the internet.” I think it’s more accurate (thought a bit awkward) to say: “Linking is not the only novel aspect that occurs ON the internet.” Links, after all, are only one way to represent information, and protocols other than http use other metaphors: bulletin boards, mail correspondence, etc. Just as there is a significant difference between colloquims, symposiums, forums, dialogues, monologues, drama, etc., so too does presentation’s form affect information’s character.

Second, I should make it clear that I believe that there is a distinction between linking and copying. I suspect that linking will eventually (hasn’t this already happened in legal precedent?) fall into the area of copyright that permits either limited quoting or creative re-use. Google News almost certainly falls within the bounds of acceptable limited quoting (but the old legal framework still doesn’t quite fit the new reality, does it?).

Newspapers are going out of business not because of Google News, but because of Craigslist. Craigslist doesn’t reproduce any newspaper content; to the contrary, it competes with newspapers fairly. Zell looks rather like a sore loser.

It is a little surprising that Sam Zell and the Washington Post reporters seem to be unfamiliar with this legal and technological terrain.