There’s been plenty of bad ideas recently on how to save the newspaper industry: forcing Google to stop driving traffic to newspaper sites, for example. But here is an idea so insane as to tempt disbelief: an argument in favor of outlawing the paraphrasing or linking of articles without the expressed consent of the owner.

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It’s almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.