Harvey Weinstein, an Oscar winning producer is going to push for legislation that would force websites to pay for linking to news articles. This legislation would require websites to pay a fee to a monitoring organization for every link to an article written by a journalist.
When Weinstein stated that linking and publishing are the same, an short snippet from the article and a link are the same as publishing the whole article, he clearly shows he has no idea about either what the internet is and what makes it work.
Paying for links isnt a new idea, its brought up time and time again by stressed out publishers that cant make enough money online. Their failure to understand the way the internet works, to make money, now has to be made up with everyone paying for links to articles.
Lets turn this the other way round by stating:
Every journalist should pay for a link to their article.
Why?
Simply because if there wasn't a link to the article, it wouldnt be found, and the site it was published on would not have a single visitor and therefor no revenue at all!
Not from visitors clicking on the ads shown and te publisher would not be able to wave with a nice number of visitors to advertisers and ask a nice price. These numbers are used for calculating a monthly fee or clickrate in the exact same way a newspaper sells ads.
That dear mr. Weinstein and all you publishers out there is how the internet works. You deliver content worthwhile reading or watching and people will start linking to you. The more good links a site gets the more people will visit, the more revenue you will get.
So start working on a well based model on how to make money online instead of trying to brake down its concept!
