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From our "this is truly bizarre and misguided" department, I bring you news from the National Newspapers of Ireland:

National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), which represents 16 of the most popular national papers, said it believed "that the display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright" under current Irish law.

...

The row was sparked by the revelation that Women's Aid, a charity combatting domestic violence, had been told by an NNI subsidiary that it must pay 300 euros ($400) to display up to five links to newspaper articles on its website.

What could NNI possibly be thinking? By linking to Irish newspaper websites, Women's Aid is increasing traffic to those websites and increasing the advertising revenue they can attract.

Bizzarre and truly misguided.

Hat tip: Ferdinand van Prondzynski

Related articles

• Linking to newspaper websites for profit needs licence, says NNI (independent.ie)
• Update: Irish Newspapers Will Now Be Ignored (eogn.com)
• National Newspapers of Ireland outlines position on use of hyperlinks (siliconrepublic.com)
• Irish Newspaper Collective Wants to Charge License Fees for Links (the-digital-reader.com)
• Ireland copyright battle: Newspapers demand $400 for sharing links (rt.com)
• That Link You Just Posted Could Cost You 300 Euros (tech.slashdot.org)
• Irish newspapers and the battle to control online content (guardian.co.uk)

If you're frustrated by how hard it is to tell when "information" you find on the web is reliable, you'll want to check out Hypothes.is. I don't know anything more about it than what's shown in this short video, but it looks very promising.

Hypothes.is Intro from Hypothes.is on Vimeo.

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Last month I noted that Firefox edged out Internet Explorer as the most used browser visiting pages on this site¹, 41.21% to 41.07%. Not much, admittedly, but it was a surprise. That was last month. Now look at this:


Firefox is now well ahead of Internet Explorer in total visits. Chrome is gaining ground, but Safari is losing ground. The total number of visits (4762) is a little less than what I reported in February (4979). That change is small enough that it's not likely to have affected the results.

NetMarketShare still reports that IE is the dominant browser (62%) followed by Firefox (24%) and Chrome (6%). So face it. I'm not the only peculiar one around here. So are my visitors.²

I was looking over Google Analytics results for this website,¹ and I noticed something very interesting about the browsers visitors use:

More visitors use Firefox than Internet Explorer. Granted, Firefox wins by only 7 visits out of 4979², but I was surprised to see it come out ahead.

According to NetMarketShare, Internet Explorer has 62% of the internet browser market share, while Firefox has only 24%. I'm a big fan of Firefox myself,³ and I'm delighted to see that visitors to this site have better taste in browsers than the average Internet denizen.