Blog: Pete Loshin: What Would YOU Pay to Link to a News Story?

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What Would YOU Pay to Link to a News Story?

Last week I commented on how Microsoft wasn't planning to publish a patch for the Kama Sutra/Blackworm/MyWife worm until next week; it turned out not to be that big a deal.

But imagine my surprise when I noticed that the news source for the original article was playing some games: they'll email the article to all your friends for you, in the process collecting all of your email addresses. Or, they'll sell you a "license" to email the URL for as little as $5.00. If you prefer, you can pay a measly $2.50 to "license" the link on your own website--a better deal because if you wanted to email the URL to 200 people you'd have to pay $50.00).

The costs go up even faster if you want to license an article, or even just excerpt an article, to be used in a book or newsletter; the whole thing is done through a third-party clearance company and presumably the publisher and the clearance company split the proceeds and leave the original author out in the cold.

Rather than increasing profits, this whole thing tends to reduce the likelihood that anyone would want to link to this publisher's articles, or that other authors would cite their articles. Why bother with the cost and nuisance of this "license", or even worse, worry about legal action resulting from what would normally be considered "fair use"?

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