Monday, June 16, 2008

The Big Chill

Liberals rampaging already and Obama isn't even in the White House yet. "The Associated Press went on blog patrol recently and threatened some bloggers with lawsuits unless they removed quotes from its stories from their sites. . . There is already a body of copyright law that covers this territory, of course, and many irate bloggers contend that AP is overstepping its bounds by attempting to thwart its fair use provisions. AP and the Media Bloggers Association will meet this week to discuss the issues." see story at Keith Regan, e-Commerce Times

I suppose one could paraphrase AP and NOT link to their stories at all--just get the general drift, or twist it to the right (i.e., untwist it), but give them the nod. But that wastes a lot of time on the part of readers who then have to go search for it. No one should copy someone else's entire story or material, but excerpts are allowed by law. The bloggers may be well within their rights, but law suits are expensive, so the purpose of this is to chill freedom of information and speech, and we'll see more of this during the Obomb era.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If the Obama campaign is already directing the AP before he's even in office, just imagine how powerful he'll be once he gets elected. I bet he'll make people start taking a loyalty oath before they can see him speak, and if a reporter dares to ask him a question that he doesn't like, I'll bet he never takes another question from that reporter as punishment. In fact, I'll bet that the white house even plants "ringers" in the press core to promote its agenda, and creates pro-administration propagandist "news" stories that it sends out to local TV stations to use as "unbiased" real news.

Oh, wait. All that already happened...

Norma said...

Even liberals are right once in awhile.

Anonymous said...

*sigh*

When will it be your turn?