The media industry has faced big challenges in the Information Age. The old business model does not yield as large revenues as it used to. Ad and subscription revenues from print media are diminishing massively, but online media has not yet achieved the same level of revenues as its predecessor.
The newspapers’ publishing industry is naturally concerned about this well-documented trend. One area of where some of its representatives want to limit everyone else is the right to link to the content that newspapers publish online.
That would mean that neither Google nor other search engines nor content aggregators could link to the content of the online media anymore, despite the fact that they actually drive traffic to these websites. That could lead to the situation where, for example, Twitter users wouldn’t be allowed to provide short links to some interesting articles in the online media anymore. That is what some advocates of restrictions on Internet want to do in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
We in CyberWatcher believe it is a dangerous precedent, not only because we ourselves index the web content and provide links to it for the companies worldwide (and essentially tell to people to go to the websites of the newspapers). We also believe that this hampers one of the major rights available on the Internet – the right for freedom of information, without infringing the copyright of the content owner. If someone refers to a book, categorize it as a novel - and gives the information on where the book is available to buy / to read – does it make sense to restrict this person from doing it? Of course it’s then up to the author of the book – or publisher – what are the terms of reading the book or news article.
Obviously, the news publishers need to justify the costs they incur. However, we believe that once the content is put out freely available in Internet, everyone should be given a right to refer to this content – be it by indexing and structuring the data or simply by providing links in email.
Hence, we support the campaign initiated in the United Kingdom called Right2link.