Infowar Tactics: Copyright Laws to Hamstring Bloggers

So it appears that the idea of banning content-linking without explicit permission - ie a pay-to-link regulation - may be in the works and is this any surprise? What with Internet 2 on the way, a nice brightly coloured (fire)walled garden for our minds ... what with the old, lying mainstream media wheezing and shouting its way into senility ... what with what seems to be an expontentially growing number of abruptly awakening minds ... is it really any surprise that such a law would be talked about?

I'm sure they're not quite ready for that, yet. It will take time to draft the legislation ... to hire the lawyers ... to write the press releases and the make the propaganda. How long we have until the idea becomes a 'law', I don't know. Months, if they move fast. Perhaps a year or two if they dawdle.

It's all for naught, of course. This will blow up in their faces, like all censorship laws. The idea of course will be to strangle the blogs into submission by cutting off their access to news'paper' content, the idea being that this free access is the oxygen feeding the flames. The truth, of course ... well, the truth is that it's all about the truth. It's about certain people who want it, and others who fear it, and for those who want the truth, well, one way or another they find their ways to those who tell it.

What seems to escape the elite - or at least blowhards like Posner - is that most of the time we only link to MSM content to point out and laugh at its lies. That's it. The rest of it we generate on our own, in our spare time, for free and for the love of it. Like the kid in the back of the class cracking jokes when the teacher's not looking ... only now the class is starting to laugh so hard, we don't care so much that she knows it's us. And in this case the teacher's really screwed, because the sad fact is he's been faking his way through the course, and the class clown? He's also the smartest one there, in fact, the only one in the room who really knows the material. He's laughing because he's bored, but he's also getting the class' attention and some of them are really starting to listen to what he has to say.

Ourt victory is assured, but that doesn't mean the infowar is over. Until it is, a tactic occurs that could handily pre-empt their little legislative strangulation attempt. At the bottom of the sidebar you'll come across a Copyleft Notice:

I'd just like to put everyone on notice that - in the event of a ban on linking without permission - I hereby extend permission freely and without reservation to any website, blogger, vlogger or other media organization that extends the same permission, to myself or to others, to link to their content for no monetary charge. In the event that permission is not explicitly stated, any attempt at using copyright law to prevent myself or others linking to content will be construed as absence of permission, in which case copyright applies and if you want to link to my work, it will cost you, and no, it will not be cheap.

(I really hate writing legalese, which is why I'm a blogger and not a corporate lawyer. Events, however, seem to be forcing that upon me and yes, I resent that. So this is my little 'fuck you' to the mainstream media. When you're all paying each other for your lies and we're spreading the truth for free, well, we'll see who outlasts who.)

If enough people post something similar on their websites, we'll be in the free and clear to link to each other no matter what the law says while at the same time denying any of our own copy to the mainstream media. With time, as the talent and the eyeballs increasingly come our way (and they will) this will really start to take its toll.

So, cut us off from your content if you wish. We'll just make our own. It will blow yours out of the water, and you will come crawling back to apologize. But by then, we'll have forgotten you even existed.