Bill Keller: I heard you like copyright. You wrote one provocative
print column about it on Sunday, one
blistering blog followup on Monday, and pointed to a third
Times op-ed
piece from Sunday (headline: "Perpetual War: Digital Pirates amd Creators") that says basically the same thing.
So here's an interesting data point: on Saturday, the
New York Times blatantly and willfully violated the copyright of another publisher -- our publisher, actually. On the
Times op-ed (web) page. And in a blog follow-up to that op-ed column.
More on that in a second. But before we get our lawyers involved, and for the benefit of everyone else reading this, let's go back and start with the
Times's feelings on copyright.
Mr. Keller, the former
New York Times executive editor who has taken up opinionizing, wrote a very smug column on Sunday. The op-ed appeared under the headline "Steal this column," but he was suggesting something almost the opposite: that the millions of people who'd galvanized to oppose SOPA had been brainwashed by tech companies who aren't really all that serious about preventing piracy. "Does this smackdown mean that any attempt to police the Web for thievery is similarly doomed?" he lamented. Keller wrote that he "regard
phrases like 'Net neutrality' as Novocain for the brain." And here's his conclusion: "[O]nline companies would be crazy to let piracy kill off the commerce that supplies quality material upon which even free sites like Wikipedia depend."
