12th Man of the Day

In what I hope will become a re-occurring tribute to our drooling cousins in College Station, today we bring you BC's first honorary 12th Man of the Day, Judge Richard Posner.

Idoit, I Am.

Other than merely looking like an Aggie, The Poz has no affiliations to A&M other than thinking like one. Which makes his stacks of degrees from Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and a bunch of other smart learning institutions seem instantly worthless. I also tend to doubt the (self-published) entrance on Wikipedia proclaiming The Poz to be "the most cited legal scholar of all time" and one of the "most respected judges in the United States." This guy wants to be Brandeis in the worst way. scally probably interned for him at one point.

Anything for justice!

You see Judge Posner has a little problem with the way the World Wide Web works. This whole linking between web sites thing? Not gonna do it. It's protected, copywritten material that the rightful owners should collect a toll for, argues The Poz:

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.

Other than writing like a deflated windbag judge with a gross disregard for periods, logic, or an understanding of the medium he's criticizing, The Poz has a pretty good point: Newspapers are going broke and this is the only fucking idea I can come up with to save them. Ol' Dick can't take his morning constitutional without the Grey Lady in hand, its day-old news freshly creased. Not when the real enemy is still at large. The democratic weapons of mass destruction known as "Laptops and "wifi" might somehow cross signals with his Viagra and stream porn across his synapses while rendering conservative! judicial! opinions! with a quill pen!

So let's go after the real enemy - The Internet - and bring that floozy Al Gore right down with it. All you who dare to read the nyt.com or latimes.com for free are soon to face a judgment day when all links between copyrighted content shall cease to exist. Boom, motherfucker! The Internet as you know it will be taken down like an AT-AT on planet Hoth and literally crumple to the ground ... you know, where reality exists and newspapers are still read. Here at BC, we'll subsist by linking to eachother's stories in our own form of non-credentialed inbreeding.

All your links are belong to us!

To summarize: Richard Posner, publisher of 40 books and ranking judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, is actually proposing that links between sites that share proprietary copyrighted be banned. We all know it's not news unless it's printed in a newspaper but this takes stupidity to a whole new level. But wait, there's more! Not only should links be banned but the paraphrasing of copyrighted material -- the work of pretty much every blog out there -- would also be forbidden. So if I wanted to share my thoughts on an article about Scipio's sex change published in the San Francisco Chronicle? Out of luck. I would link to it but it's illegal. Google? Adios, pinche. Twitter? The work of the devil!

The logic that you could just turn off the tap of free information in order to save the bloated dead carcass that is the newspaper business model is Aggy at best, and well, it just doesn't get any worse than that.

So for this ingenious solution to usurp the Internet and return Newspapers to their rightful place at the top of the, uh, newschain, I hereby award Richard Posner BC's first ever 12th Man of the Day award.

Nice work, Dick.

Bankruptcy, front door to your right.

Can I get a whoop whoop?