Oscar winning producer, Harvey Weinstein, a strong supporter of Obama, is going to push for legislation that would force websites to pay for linking to news articles. This legislation would require news websites and blogs to pay a monitoring organization (can we say, Big Brother's Watching!!) a fee for every link to an article written by a journalist.
Like my blog here and other sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google would have to pay for the privilege of including snippets and links to news stories! This is nothing more than just plain old censorship and trying to make it so that we go back to the days before the internet where we were only told the news that the liberal media (thus the government) wanted us to know!
This blogger has pointed out for many years now that mainstream media reporters have been nothing more than governmental puppets reporting only what the fascist US government wants the public to know and be aware of, even if they have to lie to do it! They are no longer true journalists reporting both sides of the story fairly and without bias so that we ourselves can deduce the truth. The internet has provided an avenue to do just this. And not just from America, but from all over the world! We get to see ourselves from many different viewpoints and get to see what truly is happening out there in the real world.
And fascists like Weinstein want to curb this cause God forbid that the slaves become educated to what their fascist government and supporters are actually doing, right? So, let's just charge them for spreading news that might educate them with the truth, with a fee each time they do!!!!
For example, I'm going to do right now, exactly what Weinstein wants to charge us for, so you can see what Rich Ord at WebProNews so succinctly wrote:
Weinstein said, “Journalists don’t benefit when their stories are taken, and given a link. It would be like me launching a newspaper–call it Link—where I can have the greatest journalists in the world working for me without paying them. It’s inconceivable. If BMI and ASCAP can monitor the music business, we need a BMI and an ASCAP to monitor these businesses. This will be the one legislation for our industry that I’ll press.”
Weinstein may think he’s only talking about making news linking giants like Google News pay, but laws against free linking could not just apply to them. His proposed legislation would also have to apply to Reddit, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter and news publishers and bloggers who routinely republish snippets of news articles with links to the original. Many of these sites also inbed video clips as well.
Weinstein challenges the assertion by publishers that linking and taking small snippets of articles is not stealing content but is actually promoting the content. Weinstein equates linking and publishing as one and the same. Weinstein also told Deadline, “When it comes to journalists and journalism, I’m with you. It is important they get paid for good work, and wrong that others just take it, with a link.”.
Since most articles have numerous social buttons encouraging “sharing” their articles via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you would think it would be obvious to Weinstein that publishers and journalists want their stories to be linked to. The definition of going viral is mass sharing on social media sites which pushes huge numbers of people to a journalist article if he is so lucky. Linking drives traffic to an article which theoretically can then be monitized by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want the traffic he can put up a firewall login and charge visitors to read the sites content.
If a news site like Deadline doesn’t want its articles linked to then it shouldn’t publish them on a linking platform called the Web. Weinstein may be surprised to learn that Deadline and most news sites are quite happy that their articles get free traffic driven by links!
Just like the music industry, which has in the past sued the parents of kids who downloaded music without paying for it, Weinstein proposes that those linking to content should also have to pay up. He wants to do it a bit more tactifully than the RIAA, but still wants to collect nonetheless. His idea I presume is to first change the definition of fair use which is permitted per U.S. and many international copyright laws, where a website can take snippets of content and reuse it to a certain extent.
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