Keller II

And it's on.

A couple of days ago, in this space, I pointed readers to a blog post by my Boston Phoenix colleague Carly Carioli calling out New York Times executive editor-turned-columnist Bill Keller for his hard line on copyright violations - and noting that the Times, just a couple of days before, had apparently violated the Phoenix's copyright: uploading a pdf of an article that ran in a Phoenix predecessor, The Real Paper, and linking to it from a Joe Nocera column.

Well, Mr. Keller has replied, with a post called "Piracy Twits," which begins thusly:

If I didn’t value the First Amendment so dearly, I’d be tempted to propose a law keeping irony out of the hands of the clueless.

And Carly is back, with news of another Times violation of copyright law. An excerpt:

After we published our letter to Keller yesterday, I got an email from Simon Waxman, the managing editor of the Boston Review. In September 2011, the same Times columnist -- Joe Nocera -- wrote this op-ed column, drawing on material from an article that Tennessee Congressman Jim Cooper had written earlier that year for the Boston Review. The Cooper article was freely available on the Boston Review site, but instead of linking to it, the Times instead uploaded a PDF of Cooper's article to their servers, where it's been hosted ever since. That PDF included not only Cooper's piece but contributions from ten other authors. "[The Times] never sought our permission or, as far as I know, the permission of the eleven authors whose work they reproduced," Waxman says.

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post, Joe Nocera called me to read me the riot act. He's pissed that my post caused the Times took down the Clark Booth article, a fantastic piece that deserves to be in circulation. But after I confronted him with the Boston Review article, we had a substantive discussion on the current state of copyright, and the challenges it poses to either of us posting Booth's story. He said, "You're right. I have not thought about these issues as closely as I could." He added that he simply hadn't realized the substantive difference between linking to a PDF of the Boston Review article and linking to the Boston Review site. "I'm a lot more aware of it now."

For what it's worth, this isn't about hanging Joe Nocera out to dry -- it's about the Times's institutional myopia when it comes to intellectual property. How many more examples of this hypocrisy will we have to uncover before the Times begins to acknowledge that the problem isn't merely piracy -- the problem is a copyright law written so stringently that not even a newspaper with the resources of the New York Times can comply with it? As several commenters on our original post have pointed out, under some of the proposed language for SOPA and PIPA, a website that engaged in copyright infringement equivalent to the Times's hosting of our article could be blocked from the DNS registry.

That was the entire point of my first post: that the copyright fundamentalism advocated by big-media barons like Keller and the Times is counterproductive -- even to newspapers like the Times.

After talking with Nocera, I'm committed to getting the Clark Booth piece back online in some form.

If you love media smackdowns - and who doesn't - this is getting good.