“I always knew Righthaven would file bankruptcy if things got rough,” Kincannon told me by e-mail. “They were set up as a limited liability company just so they could do that. Fortunately, Stephens Media, MediaNews Group, Sherman Frederick, Steve Gibson, and Dickinson Wright all seem to have plenty of money.”

Moreover, because none of the postings by Colorado Pols generated any appreciable traffic at the websites of the underlying publishers, it is beyond dispute that this copying by Colorado Pols harmed the market value and revenue-generating potential of the infringed works. Indeed, MediaNews Group has been monitoring the traffic to its sites from ColoradoPols during the listed time period, and the links inserted by Colorado Pols in the infringing excerpts of MediaNews Group's stories are generating no more than zero to five clicks to the underlying stories at The Denver Post's website.

In light of these considerations, Colorado Pols has no legal basis for invoking the Fair Use Defense, or the First Amendment, to justify its unfair competition with our clients. This kind of misappropriation simply has no defense under the law.

This statement is remarkable for a number of reasons, but the biggest problem with what Singleton is proposing is that it is totally counterintuitive to how marketplaces work. The market determines the clearing price of a product, not the owners of that product. Attempts to force the market to give you a bigger profit...well, they end in disaster. Every time.

The idea that the Post will suddenly become more valuable if it is not offered for free online doesn't fix the fundamental problem that the news in general is already offered online, everywhere, for free. It doesn't make the print version of a newspaper more valuable or more relevant if you have to pay to read it online; all it does is make the newspaper more complicated to read, and thus, less attractive to most potential readers (and advertisers). In going to a paid online model, what they will be doing is saying, "you can't get our version of the news for free anymore." In response, most people will just shrug and visit other websites instead, just like we are doing in response to this letter.

One of the neat things about the Internet is that we don't have to make assumptions here - we can actually show you whether or not referencing the Post is vital to our "business model." In April 2010, the last full month that we referenced the Post or any of the outlets included in this letter, Colorado Pols generated 617,661 page views. If it were true that our very existence depended upon the Post and similar news outlets, it would stand to reason that our traffic would drop dramatically once we stopped talking about them, right?

We've told you what kind of traffic we received in April, and we'll tell you what kind of traffic we have once the month of July is completed - an entire month of no references to the Post or others listed in the letter, from either us or others posting diaries or comments. We are fully confident that our traffic won't decrease because we aren't referencing the Post, because we know that our success has absolutely nothing to do with the Post, the Lamar Ledger, or any other news site. People come to Colorado Pols to read (wait for it) Colorado Pols. It's not any more complicated than that.