Monday, July 6, 2009

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post, Psychegram!

Franz said...

Yes indeed! Great post.

I'm sure you've already seen it but this comes from the horse's mouth itself:

Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

Horse's mouth or whichever organ is appropriate. Anyway Murdoch is so plugged into the political matrix (at least in Australia, US, UK) we may as well take his threat as the Official Word:

http://gunnyg.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/rupert-murdoch-%E2%80%9Cinternet-will-soon-be-over%E2%80%9D/

su said...

The saddest thing is that to so many, like my mother, Murdoch is a good, successful man.
How does he live with himself an d justify the oxygen he breathes.

psychegram said...

Murdoch is a pigdog.

Hmm. I wonder if that counts as libel? Or if it would under Sunstein's new libel laws? Seems we have more to worry about than a strengthening of copyright to include linking without permission as a violation. They really are pulling out all the stops here and you sort of have to ask why but of course, we know why, don't we?

Well, it won't stop Les. And it won't stop me. I'm Canadian, bub, so your Amurican 'law' doesn't affect me, at least not right away and anyhow ... I can all too easily blog under a pseudonym, using an anonymizer, becoming for all legal intents and purposes a ghost that cannot be connected to any living being. Hard to sue a ghost.

And if I can do it ... we all can.

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Thus it has always been and no laws they pass can ever change that.

Penny said...

the msm media should be grateful to blogs that link to there stories,even if it is to decimate them?

It likely helps with some readership for these shills.
Readers they wouldn't normally have.

It is like cutting off there nose to spite there face