Considering how, "in recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe they’re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers," with even "appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wr[iting] a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and paraphrasing their content," media blogger Simon Owens (Bloggasm.com, 7/6/09) has conducted an experiment to evaluate the premise of corporate media management "that news aggregators simply repackage news so there’s little incentive to click on the actual link":

So how much traffic does a large news aggregator like Huffington Post bring? I’ve been linked several times within Huffington Post, but typically on its users blogs, which only send a few hundred readers at most. But on early Friday I was fortunate enough to be featured prominently on Huffington Post’s front page with a banner headline linking to one of my articles.

How much traffic did this link bring? Lots. For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

But though the first day’s worth of traffic was the heaviest, the Huffington Post continued to send me strong traffic for two more days as the link moved down on its main page but remained prominent on its highly-trafficked Politics page.

"All together," Owens tells us, he "received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period," while days later "still seeing relatively strong traffic from there"--which all sounds like decidedly good news for linked-to big media outlets, doesn't it?

Richard Posner is the sort of judge who gets mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee because of his supposed brilliance. But, then, he's also the person who wrote this:

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.

With the first suggestion, does Posner mean that copyright laws should forbid people from posting other people's material online without permission, or hacking into subscriber-only sites? Because copyright laws already do that. If he means that whenever someone puts up something on a website, you have to get their permission before you can type in the url,  that would be quite bizarre. What does he mean?

The second part is no less strange. As an anonymous commenter points out, prohibiting links would be like prohibiting footnotes; you could also compare it to outlawing card catalogs, or phone directories.  And the idea that linking to a newspaper's website somehow harms the newspaper is nutty; newspapers don't want people to stop linking to them. (They would like people to give them money for doing something that people have an inherent 1st Amendment right to do, but that's a different question.)

The gap between the federal Appeals Court judge's understanding of copyright law and the Internet commenter's is striking.  Maybe Anonymous should be nominated to the Supreme Court?