My letter to the NPR ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, regarding NPR's link policy: http://www.npr.org/about/linking_form.html From: Cory Doctorow Date: Thu Jun 20, 2002 08:48:05 PM US/Pacific To: ombudsman@npr.org Subject: NPR's linking policy, your responses to Farhad Manjoo Dear Mr. Dvorkin, I'm writing to you today to ask you to reconsider NPR's terrible, foolish, misguided linking policy, as expressed on this form: http://www.npr.org/about/linking_form.html. I was willing to believe that this policy (which has apparently been in effect for some time now) was merely the misguided zeal of some copyright-maximalist in-house counsel, but it appears (based on your remarks as reported by Mr. Manjoo in this morning's Wired News) that this policy indeed reflects the considered position of NPR, which has also constructed a torturous bundle of rationalizations for this. There is simply no excuse for this policy. The Web is made out of links. The default assumption of the Web is that any resource with a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be freely linked to by third parties without prior permission. NPR's own site contains hundreds, if not thousands, of links to third parties, and I am inclined to believe that NPR did not submit the kind of detail requested in the form above about its organization and intended use of links to each of those web-authors. (Indeed, if NPR has been paying good money to a staffer charged with securing such permissions, let me give you the welcome news that NPR's precious fundraised dollars can be freed up from that senseless adventure and put to better use in the production of programming). Tens of thousands of Internet users (and potential NPR contributors) have been outraged by this policy. The Internet's users have an instinctive grasp of the danger to the Web that your policy presents. A Web whose default assumption is that explicit permission must be sought prior to linking is a Web that will dissolve into its many atomic parts. The strength of the Web is in its links. NPR's farcical policy reflects a deep and disturbing ignorance of matters technical. For starters, you can trivially block off-site referrers with a few lines of Web-server configuration. If it is cheaper for you to pay a policy person to review requests for links from the 20,600 linkers that Google reports for NPR.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Anpr.org) than it is to pay a systems administrator to enter one line in your Web-server's configuration file, then you are either drastically underpaying your policy staffers or drastically overpaying your systems administrators. Seriously, though. The vast majority of Web-page-authors (like myself) understand the Web well enough to understand that inbound links are the settled technical practice of the Internet. We like being linked to. We encourage others to link to us. You have the technical means at your disposal to block all inbound links and so indicate your preference (though such a preference would be deeply misguided); I have no such technical means at my disposal to indicate my preference for being linked to. If the assumption is changed on the lines you've advocated, inbound links will be a thing of the past. Your remarks to Wired News are deeply disturbing: >Dvorkin said he told the e-mailers "that NPR does not refuse links but >it just wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a >noncommercial and journalistic organization. I work for a nonprofit organization. I am a journalist. I do not labor under the misapprehension that I have, in either capacity, the ability to control the context in which my work is referenced or cited. This is the United States, where copyright exists on the basis of a constitutional argument that indicates that an author's monopoly does not derive from a European-style "droit moral," but rather from a specific objective, "to promote the useful arts and sciences." Absent any droit moral, you have no basis for asserting an IP interest in the context in which your work is referenced. >"We wouldn't want a commercial outfit to use us in any way they >pleased..." Your link policy is irrelevant to this objective. A commerical interest that appropriated material in which you had a legitimate IP interest would be engaged in infringing activity (unless that appropriation fell inside the scope of fair use). However, absent droit moral, a "commercial outfit" is free to reference you, cite you, *even quote you* if they care to. Here are some commercial outfits that "use you:" * The private tutor who brings a tape of your work to her pupil's study * The media critic for a rival radio station who excerpts a brief recording of one of your newscasts as part of a critical study of news reportage * The search engine that indexes your site and places links to your page in a search-results screen that includes banner ads Do you believe that you have the right or ability to estop these uses? >It isn't only commercial activity that concerns NPR. Asked if a link >from someone's noncommercial homepage would bother the company, Dvorkin >said: "It depends on your homepage -- what if you're an advocate for >left-handed socialist diabetics? We wouldn't want to give support to >advocacy groups." You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of news in the public discourse. This misunderstanding in someone highly placed at a respected news-agency is very disheartening. Reportage consists of opinion and public facts. News agencies produce material that enters the public discourse -- those facts and opinions. If your soi-distant left-handed socialist diabetics were to gather at a town hall for a debate with right-handed laissez-faire sugar-hounds and the LHSDs cited an NPR news-report to support their position, they would be using NPR's reportage in exactly the way it was intended, as part of the discourse. On the Web, the town hall is distributed, smeared across a million independently managed sites. Our discourse consists of comments and links and context. Your position with respect to advocacy groups is ridiculous. Citing a news-story, referencing it with a link, is a recitation of a public fact: "NPR said thus-and-so at such-and-such a place," possibly combined with an opinion, "And I believe that their position means this." That is discourse. That is discussion. That is why NPR exists. >"It's part of keeping our integrity that our journalism remain >noncommercial, and we're not engaged in advocacy in any way," Dvorkin >explained. Your integrity rests on the public's perception of your reasonableness, your understanding of the ways of the world. With every passing moment that this policy remains in effect, your erode that perception, erode the public's confidence in NPR's ability to deliver accurate and balanced news. No one wants to get their picture of the world from a fool; please show the world that NPR is not made up a fools and eliminate this policy immediately, apologize and get on with the news. -- Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com http://www.craphound.com Blog: http://boingboing.net