Or am I *really* pretending ...?

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There is some information, to be sure, that is now a free commodity and once was available only through newspapers. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the information that takes work -- and professional skill -- to gather and present in a high-quality way, from a trusted source.

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If this is your reading of the history of US copyright law (and the Constitution), then I suggest you're not "deeply familiar" with any of it. In fact your comments call into question whether you know what "copyright" is at all. Because private owners of copyrights frequently defeat defendants who claim a constitutional right to "freedom of expression," and in many areas the copyright-holders' position is actually getting stronger as time passes.

A narrow-copyright position is one worth defending, and can be advocated in many ways. I suggest that you'll be a much better advocate for it if you refrain from making completely nonsensical assertions about US law.

And come on, phrases like "Posner is nuts" and "dorkmeister" and "You fail at US history" just demonstrate that you haven't even tried to grapple with the tough questions here. Judge Posner's conjecture here is an entirely valid and necessary step in reasoning toward a legal conclusion. These are hard questions that deserve careful analysis of the alternatives -- and I'll bet most "professional scribblers" would agree.

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[gawker.com]

and

[gawker.com]

For starters. But really if anyone had a brilliant idea to save newspapers, it would already be happening.

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Then when other sites link to it, the link-clickers get a message stating they need to register to view the content.

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There has been talk of all the news orgs banding together and instituting fees collectively, but nothing much has come of it yet and it's not clear that it would be legal if it happened. (Anti-trust laws and whatnot.)

The WSJ is really the one newspaper that's been able to do it, and lots of other, dumber newspapers look at them and say "if they can do it, why not us?" but they don't realize that what the WSJ offers is unique and highly specialized content that nobody else does and that directly makes their subscribers money. $50 or $60 is nothing to pay for something that you can directly credit with being responsible for $10,000 or $100,000 or $1 million in investment gains per year.

That's not going to be the case for the NY Post or whatever.

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On the other hand, it might work. But as others here point out, no one wants to be first to try it. Which is weird to me -- if you know for sure the end is coming, why not try the crazy remedy? I suppose because they don't want to risk losing money, and because, no matter how apparent it seems to the rest of us that newspapers are on their way to extinction, the fourth estate in this country has not exactly been noted for its handle on reality of late.

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It reminds me of the city government here in Kansas City; so much doesn't get accomplished because of petty things - it's a system maintained by people who have been marginally rewarded for adhering to it, and they are either unwilling or incapable of understanding how to go about changing it.

But sooner or later it will change. And when they haven't anticipated the coming change, they will be left behind.

I suppose it goes without saying that I'm been unemployed for months.

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The bloggers can link to the NYT, but that's were the money comes in. If the information source has pay-wall up, bloggers can't just link to it and give their readers the info that way.

So you can "claim things" on the internet through a combination of copyright law (to prevent wholesale copying of content) and charging for content (to prevent free linking to info).

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