Linking to copyright assholes: Don’t do it

What’s a copyright asshole, you ask? A person or group that runs a site that belives that copyright law allows them to republish, without paying any fee, material from another site. Sites like Common Dreams and Global Free Press, to which I won’t link because that only supports their assholeness. Secondary are sites like Paul Andrew’s Hypodermia and garret vreeland’s dangerousmeta which support these assholes by linking to them instead of taking a few moments to find the original, copyrighted posting. The asshole sites argue that they are providing an educational service by reposting the articles but I say they are just too lazy to do what I and many other people do: write short summaries commenting on some article and linking to it inside that commentary.

Update: garret has posted a response, saying that he would generally prefer to link to the original source but on occasion time or other circumstances cause him to not do this; he does agree with me that summaries with links would be better ways for those sites to educate their readers. I find garret’s answer to much towards the slippery slope to agree with though. (Note that due to the style of his weblog (which I love), garret does not provide permalinks for each entry but only for each day so you may need to scroll down a bit to see his answer.)