McGarr Solicitors of Dublin reports on local newspapers' bizarre demand to be paid if you direct people to read their websites. To be completely clear about it, is isn't about fair use, fair dealing, excerpts, headlines or any of that. It's about links.
"This is not a joke. … This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one– belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed."
It's as if the newspaper business was still run by clueless middle-aged white drunks, or something.
