This whole argument is premised on the assumption that we must save newspapers. At the cost of making the internet into an inefficient mess! So Richard Posner, professional smart man and US Appeals Court judge who writes 23,000 words per day, floated the idea of banning links (and more!), so internet cannibals don't keep stealing newspaper content for nothing:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Periods, Richard Posner. Try them. To break up text. What you may notice here is that Posner proposes banning linking or paraphrasing copyrighted materials. The problem: this is America dude, we say what we fucking want, amirite?

You can copyright a news story, but you can't copyright the news. "The news" just means "things that happen in the world." What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let's ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

We all know journalism happens only at newspapers. Better to protect them at all costs than to invest in the murky "future."

This idea is supported by a newspaper columnist! Connie Schultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (who's married to a senator, btw, nothing to see here), also touts the idea of giving newspapers a 24-hour injunction on news they post, during which time it's all theirs, and can't be aggregated by others online.

Fine. You can have your injunction. But you can't stop anyone from discussing, and writing about, current events. As they happen. Go read all those "Twitter Generation" stories you guys are always writing! The idea that it's worth crippling the entire free flow of information on the internet in order to add to the bottom line of newspaper companies is prima facie idiotic. I guess you could also help save newspapers by passing a law that everyone has to buy one every day, or by making it illegal for TV news to exist. That doesn't make those things good ideas.

If Bill Gates pledged to make it so computers could not be operated properly until the user could prove they had read today's Cleveland Plain-Dealer that might save a reporter and he is a monster for not doing so, QED.
[Pic: Chronicling America]

Eggers said the following thing on a Tribeca rooftop this week to a bunch of literati types who were honoring him for his charity work:

The written word-the love of it and the power of the written word-it hasn't changed. It's a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don't get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org-if you want to take it down-if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney's will be a newspaper-we're going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you're wrong.

Should have given out your mailing address dude. We will explain, in the form of a senryu:

Email's electronic
That's killing print
You're losing your twee touch, Dave

[New Yorker. Pic: Portroids]

In Harper's, Gideon Lewis-Kraus says that the "mid-twentieth-century good fortune of publishing" that allowed highbrow writers to live a well-compensated life of literary leisure was an anomaly. So stop whining:

[Some say] contemporary late-corporate publishing is a fallen world in which Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada,gets really rich, while Richard Ford, one of the indisputably important novelists of our time, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter, gets slightly less rich. None of the elegists say: What is coming to an end is the idea that Richard Ford is going to be richer than Lauren Weisberger. None of them say: What is coming to an end isthe wishful insistence-for it is, ultimately, a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people-that Richard Ford is going to be rich at all.

In other words, chill out, fancy literary types!

For if in the end the money disappears, and, sadly, it probably will, then so be it: there will still be a party, and maybe that party won't be in New York or in the displaced New York that is Frankfurt, but neither will the Rieslings cost 12 euros.

This argument shadows a grander argument, often unstated, that says: Yes, the money is draining out of publishing (and journalism, for that matter) but that's a good thing. Then people will only write for the love, and real writers will win, because they will press on, while money-chasing hacks will fade away.

But the book industry (and the journalism industry) isn't the music industry. Authors can't support themselves doing reading tours in small-town bars until that big break comes through. The people putting forth the purist argument have probably never had a huge student loan bill to pay back, or faced years working at Starbucks while writing that novel. Let's hope the money comes back for everybody. Even real authors are willing to concede all the Devil Wears Prada-s it takes for them to be able to get an advance big enough to make that grad school bill seem like a worthy investment.