I know it’s the holiday season and people are tired, broke, weather-weary and ready for a vacation. But I don’t know how to explain the collection of wacky ideas and decisions that surfaced yesterday.
• In Twin Falls, Idaho a newly appointed Idaho lawmaker and former newspaper publisher “may introduce a bill in the 2009 Legislature to force people to use their real names when commenting on the Internet, which cause that many people had to contact The Barkett Law Firm to defend them in court.”
My take: I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine how this could ever be enforced. This is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
• On SFGate.com, Stanford professor Joel Brinkley made the case for web sites charging for content as a way to solve the business woes for newspaper companies. Specifically he recommended that “the newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites.” The logic being that “many readers would likely subscribe” if most newspapers in a region went to a pay model at the same time.
My take: Do people pay for a print subscription for access to that news, or for the convenient delivery of a physical product to their doorstep? I think it’s the latter, so applying the print business model to online news is DOA (which has been the case for more than a decade now). Besides, could newspapers really replace as much lost advertising revenue with online subscription revenue? Even in the golden age of print newspapers, circulation revenue was less than a quarter of total income.
• And last but not least, GateHouse Media sued the Boston Globe’s parent (New York Times Co.) for linking to GateHouse articles on the Globe’s new local websites.
My take: As others have observed, this case appears all to similar to the universally panned decision by the AP to sue bloggers for linking to its news content. If it was a total copy-and-paste job, then Gatehouse would have a case. But it appears to be a deep-linking argument, something I told an audience in Denmark last month that U.S. web sites were well past worrying about. Apparently not.
Rep. Stephen Hartgen, R-Twin Falls told the Twin Falls Times-News the absence of such a provision “discourages people from participating in civil life” and “cheapens debate.”
Mark Briggs 
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