The Personal Use issue is a red herring.

They actually have said, in this and other earlier statements, that there is no legal difference between links- no matter what kind of use is being made of them
“the same legal principles apply to both” as they say.

The statement is therefore a restatement of the assertion (still not supported by citing any statutory basis) that newspapers have the power to grant or withhold permission to link to their sites.

No problem. Nobody post links to any of their sites and it wont be long before they change their minds. Advertisers will start pulling out when they see traffic is down. In summary they can go and shite.

What do they consider personal use exactly?

I’m not a company but if i post a link to a newspaper on eircomsucks.com will they want payment from me?

What if i post as a user on http://www.boards.ie and say xyz about a story and post a link, will they want payment from me and/or boards.ie/daft media?

The newspapers here are just trying to somehow protect their dieing business model, rather then evolve and try and compete in a new online world like thejournal.ie or even the likes of bbcnews.com they want tp protect the old business model for as long as they can.

The sad thing is, they are fools and the old business model is dieing a death.

I’d love to share this with my friends, but I’m confused about whether I’m allowed :(

The NNI members have probably realized they’ve shot themselves in the foot after the article on mcgarrsolicitors.ie. If they insists on charging per link used, Google would drop them from their database like a rock in the water, as would every other search engine.

NNI probably also finally realized that anyone sharing links drives traffic TO their sites by way of FREE ADVERTISING. I share links around quite frequently. If I got hit up for fees, I’d send a few back of my own for advertising fees.

Standard industry practice allows a person or company to use quotes based on a ‘fair use’ basis. This means a small percentage of a total work can be quoted without having to pay fees, and as long as the original source is quoted. One is not meant to take a full article, such as this one, and post it in its entirety onto a blog or other website, regardless if they’re claiming it’s their own or the property of TheJournal.ie or the author, Susan Daly. That’s not just copyright infringement, it’s also plagiarism (if claiming the work as one’s own).

However, one can pull the first paragraph or two of this article and post it on their site and link back to this original page under ‘fair use’. This is what most people do. The previous days discussions about this issue have pretty strongly insinuated that the NNI members want fees for doing this.

If this becomes law, I can see most of these papers going out of business fairly rapidly. Not just from readers no longer sharing content, thus losing readership and advertising sponsors, but also from search engines no longer catering to their sites, which is actually a free service for the NNI members.

Personally, as a business owner, if anyone wants to share pages off my website with friends, go for it. I just ask that you credit us for the content by linking to our pages. It’s all free advertising for us and I thank you! :-)

Well their logic concerning hyperlinks also dictates that the NLI should be storming local noticeboards and slapping fines on those who tack up clippings from newspapers.

“The display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright”

Total nonsense.
There is no unique content under the standards of what is copyrightable in a url.

Even with the content itself ‘fair use’ is a standard of copyright so a small extract is perfectly allowable.
If you wanted to go stricter you could re-write the article title in your own way, but you could not copyright the URL itself. There is no copyrightable content in a url.

I stopped buying the IT since Xmas eve when despite in a reducing market and in the middle of a severe recession they increase their price to their customers in the Republic. The Law of Diminishing Returns never seem to cross their minds nor the fact as to why it is still referred to as a Law.

If they don’t want it shared, stop putting “Share this” buttons under the articles.

Belgian newspapers have been through all of this, and it didn’t turn out to well for them…

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110718/16394915157/belgian-newspapers-give-permission-to-google-to-return-them-to-search-results.shtml

So by NNI’s logic, if a librarian points to a book on a library bookshelf then he or she is infringing the copyright of that book.

I obtain all my news on the Internet and use the Journal on a daily basis and I am in my mid seventies.

Blatantly copying chunks of content on to your webpages one could understand as infringement but trying to restrict linking to content is just silly…a link is no more than recommending/referencing and actually strengthens their website and sends referral traffic….greedy shower of toerags!

I recently told somebody where to find an old copy of the Indo, thus inadvertently sending the paper a new reader without first asking permission.

I hope their bill for my mistake won’t be too high and I promise never to recommend them to anyone again.

If they keep this up The Journal and the rest will make a killing. You’re watching the dying days of traditional Irish media. We should do everything in our powers to help Irish newspapers get this through. Keep it up..the sooner the better.

What if the hyperlink is to a Google search for an article title that matchs the title on the other news site, does that bypass the charge. Will Google look for a charge for that hyperlink.

This is such a trivial action. to copy and paste a link wrap it in some HTML and post it on your own website. That very act should not require licencing. its a Joke and whats more It needs to get as much air time as possible to show how silly this is…

Newspapers should be paying people to link to their online articles, that’s how the generate traffic and therefore make money out of having these articles online. By their logic I should start charging Facebook for the privilege of hosting my content?!

Who controls NNI? Would i not be correct in saying Denis O’Brien? Pat Rabbitte refused to limit his ownership rights and control of media in Ireland. This is what you get in return. We also had FFG supporting ACTA when the rest of Europe said it was censorship of media and therefore voted against it. We are being controlled more and more. For years, Irish Press and the Indo/Sindo were the mouth pieces of the political establishment. With newspaper sales dwindling and only being read by older generations, these new measures and controls are being put in place to limit freedom of speech, to suit the Political establishment and their very wealthy media oligarchs. Shameful, and its no surprise the rest of the world media are laughing at Ireland.

And yet they’re charging advertisers on the basis of a given amount of web traffic, which, without links will come from…???

I look forward to aggregated news websites charging The Irish Times for linking to their news articles and thus generating more money for them in their banner advertising revenue. That must be worth a 15% cut I’d imagine?

I haven’t bought a newspaper in five years, I get all my news on my smartphone,nThe only time I miss the Irish times is when I have caught a few trout and need to gut them?

Considering most off the print media now use “lifting” copy and paste from the web I find it quite strange that they would be concerned about copy right infringement

This is just crazy, by creating a hyperlink to an article you are generating traffic to their site and in-turn increasing their readership. Also, most of them have social sharing buttons???????????????????????????????

While the argument for stopping online news aggregators inserting links to articles on “established” and “reporter employing” newspaper sites is obviously fatally flawed and cannot be justified in the context of the basic function of the worldwide web, what is the case for or against the “scraping” and rebranding of news by framing the third party content within an aggregator site while keeping the reader within the confines of the referring site? Surely this is not justifiable or fair use?