The Anti-Web Dept: I just saw a Wired article detailing iCopyright.com, a company that allows publishers to charge for links. That's right, they want you to pay for the right to put a hyperlink on your site that points to a page on their site. This is just sad and wrong on so many levels:

1. Charging for links goes completely against everything the web was meant to do. Freely connected information, remember? I don't know about you, but if it came down to paying $50 for the right to link to a news article, I'll just summarize the damn thing in my own words and keep the money. And then how will the news publisher get traffic? Mark my words. This sort of short-sighted foolishness will kill many websites. Especially now that many newspapers are going digital.



2. What about search engines? I can pretty much guarantee Lycos and Yahoo aren't going to pay $50 a pop just because some moron thinks he can charge for what every sane person on the planet gives away. And again, what do you think will happen to the hit counts of the sites that charge?



3. This all got started because many periodicals charge for reprints. This makes sense, since reprints, by definition, must be printed and shipped. But once you go digital, the old rules no longer apply (regular readers: how sick are you of hearing me say this?). Treating a hyperlink as the same thing as a reprint is lunacy, and it shows a fatal misunderstanding of how the web works. After all this time, some people still don't get it.



4. Worse, the agreement you have to sign when you purchase the link forces you to agree to make no derogatory comments about the site, the writer, or those depicted in the document. If you linked to a newspaper article about the presidential election, bam! You're prohibited from criticizing Dubya. Do I have to go into why this is wrong?

Thanks to Mike Cane for the pointer to this. I'm just flabergasted.