Another Talking Head on how the Copyright Royalty Board threatens to destroy the promise of Internet-based radio.

[Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan]

Not related to the specific post, but to trends on this site in general. Two types of links are cropping up frequently that pose a problem.

One is stealth PDFs. The other is links to the login page at nytimes.com -- an attempt to get people to fork over money to them?

Both types of links should at minimum be marked, preferably with a big WARNING: PDF in the one case and $$$ in the other, so people can easily avoid wasting their time.

The book draft site also has stealth PDF links aplenty, not marked as such; people assuming they are going to get an HTML version are in for a nasty surprise, especially if they have older browsers or hardware and it actually crashes instead of just hanging for several minutes with 100% CPU use.

I recommend you mark clearly all links to PDFs and not even post links to "premium" (i.e. behind any kind of register- or paywall) articles. Look for a free copy. Linking to an "insert coin to continue" page instead of a freely readable article has added irony value on this of all blogs, and may serve to degrade your reputation and make you look hypocritical, though I strongly doubt that you are anything but sincere. (If the site is sneakily taking articles that were freely viewable and erecting new paywalls in front of them on the QT, then avoid linking to that site at all. Then they can't mess with your older posts and make you look like a hypocrite -- which, by the way, being a media company, they may well be doing intentionally, if they see your arguments as a threat!)

I have linked to a few NY Times articles, but only the free ones, none of the pay stuff (NY Times Select). Have you been required to pay to read what I thought was free? I am curious about this.

Most of the broken links are to the NY Times. The NY Times provides them for free for a period of time, then puts them behind a subscription firewall after a while. That means that links to the NY Times have the undesirable property of expiring. I don't know that we can avoid them entirely, but a lot of these articles are syndicated on sites that don't have a subscription; so we should make an effort to do a quick google search and see if we can locate a source other the the NY Times.

On the pdf - I agree we should mark them.

Point taken. IF I can find an open site, I will do so. Otherwise I will try to quote heavily from the original. I was able to find an open site for the NYTimes article on Patenting Life.

I have never knowingly linked to a pay site. I have linked to PDF files, but never realized that it might be an issue. I will be sure to issue an PDF alert in the future. Dunno how the others feel - but I always welcome suggestions to improve my posts from an administrative standpoint.

This may improve things:

nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink