Something about the previous post which piqued my interest even more than Quint's article was the link to RIGHTSLINK. This is a quick and easy way of obtaining the right to distribute the article. I gave it a little test: it would cost me $2.50 to email Quint's article (I presume in its entirety) to 5 other people.
I didn't use it - for starters there's no option for using the content in a web log (or other non-intranet web site). Even if there were, how would I estimate my audience? I can get an idea of my hits from Salon blogs but that doesn't count people who subscribe to my feed but don't visit the actual site often. It doesn't matter anyway, because I'm claiming fair use.
This is both a welcome and a sinister development. Up to now it has been difficult to obey copyright law, even if one were a willing & able card-carrying member of the RIAA. This streamlines things significantly for charging the "casual copier". Now that they've made compliance more easy, will they do more enforcement?
It's interesting to consider that I can route this whole issue of Information Today to all of my co-workers and there will be no copyright implications for me. But if I want to email one article to 5 people, I'm up for $2.50. I can see the argument that old-fashioned routing can take a long time to reach everyone. That I'm paying for the speed & convenience of email.
But what if I just email them the URL and say it's an interesting article about information disintermediation & overload etc. Hopefully only the most rabid publisher would claim that this was copyright infringement. Does that mean that I'm paying $2.50 to save each of my friends from making the one click to access the site from their email? It doesn't seem worth it to me ... Of course all this would be different if Information Today had a restricted site which I'd already paid to access.
And what about sites like the New York Times or L.A. Times - where there's a compulsory (but free) registration?
9:03:48 PM 
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