>>We knew this was the future, by the time we were doing "Market Addicts", where we gave only a brief preview - if we included external news stories at all (although apparently for Gibson, including even the first paragraph or two as we used to do, is grounds for a fine)
However, what to do about years of past posts, as here on Ihub? 4-5 years ago there wasn't awareness of these "cut and paste" guidelines on the part of most people. That won't matter. Unfortunately it is quite likely this metric will be applied retroactively.
If the fines are $150,000 per incident, then many discussion boards on Ihub are screwed.
Reuters has been doing this for several years now, as we know, and it's just a matter of time before basically all newspaper chains have someone like Steve Gibson or Reuter's "Attributor" service holding up website owners for cash.
It's a shame, because in quite a few cases on this board, anyway, some of the original sites no longer have some of the stories still on their site. The only copy remaining is on sites like Ihub.
But this is the next, and more insidious version of the internet, I'm afraid. Paywalls to the left and right here we come (which basically means if you can't afford $25-$80/month for 'premium' content, you can't afford access to higher quality impartial financial and economic reporting like FT's, and you're at the mercy of pumpers and others with an agenda to give you biased information).
Y'know, we were better off with a public library system, because I seem to recall being able to read all the major newspapers there, and the back issues of many were available free to us on microfiche. Now, if I need to maintain everything a WSJ, NYT, FT, IBD and other subscriptions, my monthly newspaper bill alone comes out to over $250/month. Even piddly Newsday, from my hometown on Long Island, is now $260 a year.
How many households can afford that pricetag just for access to news?
The full frontal campaign to reduce most people to uninformed peasants seems well underway. Without a doubt that's what recent threats against bloggers and discussion websites is all about.
I hear the drum beat and the subtext: "Bloggers aren't economists, bloggers shouldn't comment on bias cases, bloggers definitely shouldn't be commenting on the BP oil spill."
We must accept the heavily tilted propaganda from the mainstream media, or pay up for information that is slightly less biased and manipulated.
Fck
All in all, this is turning out to be a pretty crappy century so far.
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If you take anything I say as advice, you're crazier than I am.
