Fuck you Irish newspapers

The story of how Irish newspapers are performing ballistic amputation of their own feet is gathering steam. They think they can charge sites to link directly to articles on their websites. A good summary is here

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/newspapers-charges-linking-ireland-740093-Jan2013/

Of course the story (and their attempted change to the copyright law in 2012) has not been covered at all in these papers.

Meanwhile one of the major papers carries an article titled, "Venomous and toxic social media out of control" which includes this gem: "Free speech and democracy are far better served by a regulated system of commentary, which insists on basic civilities, foremost among which is that participants identify themselves before contributing."

Right, good one, this regulated system is right now demonstrating that it cannot be trusted to report fairly and accurately (or even at all) on certain subjects - the internet and copyright law being two rather important ones.

Of course I'm not linking to this article or even saying what newspaper, not because I'm afraid of a bill but because I have no intention of ever sending another bit of traffic to one of these newspapers if I can avoid it.