Should Linking be Barred?

In the early days of the web the whole idea of linking to copyrighted content was questioned. All public content is by definition now copyrighted. That whole issue eventually went away. Now in a post by Judge Richard Posner on the bleak future of the newspaper, he suggests that the solution may require a law that prohibits linking to copyrighted content or paraphrasing copyrighted content without permission. That could put a big squelch on Web innovation that attempts to build on the innovation of others.