CEN doesn’t want to be linked to, unless they get paid? No problem – all you network admins out there take notice of this and remove any links to their domain; including any/all DNS servers.
Whoever came up with this idea at CEN should be fired for gross stupidity.

If they manage to annoy system administrators, they may find their domain names no longer resolving because, DNS is a link, you know?

They won’t have to be troubled about people linking to their content after THAT deletion takes place. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Jayde, Ask – filter CEN filter out their IP from your searchbots, keep CEN out of your search results unless you want to pay CEN to include them in your search results – those are links, too.

On the bright side for CEN, they can save money by disconnecting their Internet services – because surely no one would willingly allow CEN to link to an external server from their IP’s (or browse, or enter a search query and expect to receive a page of results).

Let’s see – their host server is

ip077244249157.rev.nessus.at – this URL appears to be redirected to Horde for Webmail service at the moment.

their ip is 77.244.249.157 -

New organizations don’t seem to understand copyright law (or are willfully ignorant). Taking your example on the death of Gaddafi. If XYZ News is the first to report the death of Gaddafi, it does own the substantive content of the story but only their manner of communicating the story to the public (i.e., the actual printed words published). Joe blogger who writes a few lines saying Gaddafi is dead has not violated the copyright of XYZ News unless the blogger uses the exact words published by XYZ News. Even then, there is the potential for a fair use defense.

Huffington Post, on the other hand, seems to borrow large word for word quotes of text from stories published elsewhere then link to the quoted story. That practice trends more into the gray area.

They should pay us for linking to them. …for all the traffic we make for them

They should pay us for linking to them. After all we are sending them traffic.

Those guys are just greedy for money. I pity them because they are forgetting that it was in bound links which put them in the PR position they are in now

Paying to link to content is a ridiculous idea. Anyone that knows anything about the internet knows people linking to your stuff is a good thing, as it will mean more people seeing it, and higher search engine results.
As for the argument that CEN is a news agency, and doesn´t receive the benefit from a link to a story published by one of its clients, this is nonsense. Firstly, it has already been paid for that story. Secondly, if its client is recieving exposure and links to the story, resulting in more eyeballs on it, this is a success for its client, which will result in more businesses for the agency.

Jon is absolutely right. Knowledge and information is absolutely useless if it is not shared. Wasn’t that the point of the internet in the first place? That it should be a linked, open source, free, shared information resource for everyone. Not this litigious, money-centric advertisement fest that we’ve turned it into, where information is not for the advancement of humanity, but a commodity to be sold.

Even if you think all of the above is a bit hippy, there is also the other argument brought forward by the likes of Lionel and Jon below, that web sites should actually be a little grateful that others find their content to be worthy enough to warrant a link. After all, it’s an endorsement of a site to link to it, isn’t it? And that’s one of the key ranking factors still. I wouldn’t put a link on our site to another site unless it was reputable, safe and information-worthy.

And @Zennedy, I don’t think folks are missing the point here. The web site was not linking to subscription-only content or any other paid-for source. It was linking to a page freely available on the web, which could have easily come up in natural search engine rankings. Therefore by your rationale, should Google, Bing and Yahoo! be paying to list these articles, too? It was only a link or two citing the source, as the news item points out above, so it isn’t really a question of content reproduction at all, is it?

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. CEN is not a publication, it’s a news agency. Its sole revenue stream is from selling stories to other publications. So it puts in the work to find and write the stories, and in turn is paid by the publications it sells the story to. The issue is when those stories are picked up and covered by other websites without a payment being made to the agency. Why would CEN receive any benefits from the HuffPo linking to the Daily Mail? The only reward for CEN, or any other news agency for that matter, is being paid for the content it produces. If the Daily Mail etc has to pay for it, then why not HuffPo? This is not just about links, this is about content.

This is dumb.

I don’t understand how they can’t see the value of having inbound links and the extra visitors that go with those links making their ads worth more.

The rational approach would be to make their content by subscription only and then no one would link to them.

Wow! I really hope this doesn’t happen! I’ve often wondered about it though. And, I can see how some content producers might make a case for another website linking to their content…especially if revenues are being collected that could be specifically associated to that linked-to content.

On the other hand, the Internet being what it is, it’s difficult to imagine how such a thing could be regulated, not to mention the administrative nightmare of paying out for every link a webmaster may choose to provide on another site. Most likely, the “inner-connectedness” of the web would begin unraveling rather quickly.

Again, I say “Wow!” I sure hope this blows over and goes away for good. I think such a thing could have far-reaching consequences even for Google and other search engines. Then there’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and all those others out there that thrive on link-outs and back-links and any other kind of links they can use to enhance their virtual money making machines. I can’t really say that all those sites actually do rely that heavily on links, but it sure appears that way. Just sayin’…

There is a such thing as “fair use”* – and I don’t think giving a snippet of an article in order to send them visitors is something anyone should have to pay for. If they continue down this track they will spell their own demise. People will ignore their “news” and find other sources who aren’t so full of themselves.

*here is what the US copyright office has to say about fair use:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

“it’s a violation of copyright if a publication even uses the original content as a starting point”

That is just barmy. Imagine if the scientific community had the same wacky ideas. Every researcher would have to start again from scratch and pretend that they were the first to even consider examining the topic.

Should people also pay to review books or films? Maybe we should pay to quote politicians or others than speak publicly.

Referencing and citing previous work is the basis of advancement of knowledge. Plagiarism is when you take the work of others and pretend that it is your own (something a lot of the writers on content farms do). To reference the work and build on it can only benefit the original publication. Didn’t anyone tell them what SEO is?