Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do and media columnist at the Guardian, has spoken out against News Corp's recent decision to block NewsNow from linking to its content, condemning Murdoch's as empire "foolish".
In his column, Jarvis argues that permitting linking is not only in News Corp's interests - as (previously) it directed traffic to the likes of Times Online, Sun Online and NotW.co.uk - but is also in the interests of democracy, allowing the public access to public information. "What's public is public - that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public," writes Jarvis. Denying NewsNow the right to link, by disabling its crawler using the robots.txt file, impedes free comment and therefore freedom of speech, he adds.
Except for the fact, that it charges for its service, of course - the crux of News Corp's argument.
That's not to say however, that NewsNow has been stealing News Corp content, says NewsNow founder, Struan Bartlett: "Linking is not some kind of digital theft," and linking via headlines, he adds, "is not substantial reproduction of a newspaper's intellectual property, so it's perfectly legitimate fair use," - a sentiment Jarvis shares in.
What's more, writes Jarvis, the "partnership" between the two companies was not one way, and if anything symbiotic, in that NewsNow linked to News Corp articles and in return benefited from an increased number of hits to its sites.
NewsNow may have acquiesced News Corps demands for the time being, but it's not going down without a fight. In latest developments NewsNow has launched a campaign fighting for its right to link at right2link.org. "Linking," says Bartlett, "is a common public amenity" upon which "journalism and an informed society depend," writes Jarvis.
Source: Guardian
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