As a guest blogger on the lively site Red State.org — this time giving his take on abortion, Barack Obama. Etc. He could be one of Senator John McCain’s most useful surrogates since he has celebrity appeal (Law & Order sets are out on DVDs, bigtime and still run on USA Network).

As you know if you are a reader of this or any number of other blogs, The New York Times broke a biggie yesterday in reporting that the Pentagon knowingly employed torture techniques that the Communist Chinese used on U.S. airmen during the Korean War to extract false confessions from them.

But if your diet is heavy with right-of-center blogs you probably wouldn’t have read a peep about this latest revelation regarding one of the darkest chapters in the history of a country that will be celebrating its 232nd birthday tomorrow. That is the embrace of torture at the highest levels of the Bush administration and its subsequent efforts to cover up something it knew to be wrong and then to justify it.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

I guess that makes us a niche read here at TMV!

Henry Farrell comments on a new paper he, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides just finished (available at SSRN — they’d like you to download from there if you’re signed up, pdf here if not):

First – blog readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like. Furthermore, blog readers are politically very polarized. They tend to clump around either the ‘strong liberal’ or the ‘strong conservative’ pole; there aren’t many blog readers in the center. This contrasts with consumers of various TV news channels, as the figure below illustrates. All of this suggests that blog readership is unlikely to be associated with the kinds of deliberative exchange between different points of view that some political theorists would like to see.

Second – blog readers are much more likely than non blog readers to engage in politics (through voting, giving money to candidates etc). Not only that, but left wing blog readers are significantly more likely than right wing blog readers to participate in politics. You could interpret this as evidence of more general depression among conservatives etc, but our best guess is that this is in large part the result of the netroots effect. Having a strong political movement which is pushing readers to make donations etc is likely to have real consequences. Obviously, we would like to have more data before we could make a really good case that our guess is correct.

John Sides has more here. Henry talked with Cass Sunstein (who he called “pretty skeptical about the virtues of Internet communication”) on the topic back in March. As did Eugene Volokh in May. Until this study I thought Volokh won the day.

I still will want to watch things evolve moving forward… btw, be sure to read the comments on the post, too.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

BooMan wants the blogosphere (espcially the progressive blogosphere) to “grow up.” From his conclusion:

Barack Obama doesn’t want to discuss John McCain’s military service. It is not a narrative that benefits him. He doesn’t want his allies gratuitously attacking the military and its generals. That is not an association that helps him. It’s nothing personal. It’s strictly politics. And if your ego gets bruised everytime the candidate stiff-arms an off message progressive, you best get into another line of work.

It’s a great post, all around, making the “Best of the Blogs” list this morning at RCP. And, in many ways, it echoes TMV’s own Shaun Mullen (or vice versa, or both).

As a young journalist I was once reminded that a journalist could either be a watchdog or a lapdog, can’t be both. Journalism, like other professions, has undergone a visible “change” in the past three decades. There was a time when many considered it a vocation (a calling), but now it is being increasingly treated as a mere job in any other industry.

Shaun Mullen’s earlier post on TV personality Tim Russert evoked interesting comments in TMV. Who is a real journalist? Can he survive in the changed world and the present media industry/culture? I have to battle with these tough questions often during my lectures on media/journalism.

A friend in India, Sanjay Sethi, draws my attention to a piece by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, who is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. Hedges latest book is Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.

To take the discussion further, let’s see what Hedges wrote: “The past week was a good one if you were a courtier. We were instructed by the high priests on television over the past few days to mourn a Sunday morning talk show host, who made $5 million a year…No journalist makes $5 million a year.

“No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that acting as a conduit, or a stenographer, for the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike real journalists. Ask Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman how often Bush or Cheney has invited them to dinner at the White House or offered them an interview.

“All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to shine a light on these lies. It is the job of courtiers, those on television playing the role of journalists, to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and never question the system…” More here…

In keeping with the changing times, who knows journalists may soon be known as media workers (belonging, as they do, to the second oldest profession in the world). This would be in line with the change in name in the oldest profession in the world — from prostitute to sex workers….

From the New York Times:

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

…

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

…

New Husseins began to crop up online as far back as last fall. But more joined up in February after a conservative radio host, Bill Cunningham, used Mr. Obama’s middle name three times and disparaged him while introducing Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, at a campaign rally. (Mr. McCain repudiated Mr. Cunningham’s comments).

The practice has been proliferating ever since. In interviews, several Obama supporters said they dreamed up the idea on their own, with no input from the campaign and little knowledge that others shared their thought.

Some said they were inspired by movies, including “Spartacus,” the 1960 epic about a Roman slave whose peers protect him by calling out “I am Spartacus!” to Roman soldiers, and “In and Out,” a 1997 comedy about a gay high school teacher whose students protest his firing by proclaiming that they are all gay as well.

The friend I’ve known the longest, since we were four years old, and I always used the other’s last name as our second (or third) middle name. She’s Italian Catholic and so had a confirmation name, so she had five names, but I had four. We did it as a sign of how close we were to each other and each other’s family. It is a wonderful, warm memory.

I don’t think I’ll be adding Hussein to my name, but I can understand the appeal for those who are doing it. Cute, very cute. I like those kinds of symbolic efforts.

The race is heating up and this is still the political doldrum month of June. Here are some links to websites of varying viewpoints. Links do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.

Barack Obama Told Supporters At A Fundraiser To Get Ready For The GOP To Play The Race Card and to Ed Morrissey this smells of political McCarthyism. Plumb Bob blog argues that the Democrats are the ones who are racists. Was this a political “sucker punch”?

BUT IN THE CASE OF SOME OF THESE POLITICAL CONFLICTS are they real or created and perpetuated by the news media? Here’s one view.

HAVE THE DEMOCRATS SET A TICKING POLITICAL TIME BOMB FOR THEMSELVES BY BACKING THE EXPANSION OF EXECUTIVE BRANCH POWER? Atrios thinks so.

IT LOOKS LIKE FOX NEWS TRIED TO GET A CERTAIN RESULT ON DEMOCRAT BARACK OBAMA WITH A POLL ON PATRIOTISM and it boomeranged..

SPEAKING OF POLLS, A NEW POLL FINDS THAT AGE IS MORE IMPORTANT IN 2008 VOTING THAN RACE…or so the Washington Post/ABC poll says. Read James Joyner for an excellent and detailed look at this poll. My view: don’t trust polls when pollsters ask people if race matters. People will not always answer honestly. The bottom line is that both Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain are walking political tightropes and are candidates who are blessed/cursed with variables.

HAS OBAMA IMPRESSED ABC’S CHARLIE GIBSON the wrong way? Gibson is irked about Obama’s decision to nix public campaign financing. The decision has irked some on the left, in the center, but especially on the right. But some have applauded his decision because they feel public financing is flawed.

SPEAKING OF THE NEWS MEDIA, A QUESTION HAS BEEN: WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES’ COVERAGE OF HILLARY CLINTON SEXIST? Clark Hoyt, the Time’s public editor (they used to call that person an “ombudsman”) says the paper performed well enough but pointed to columnist Maureen Dowd and the “relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton.” Must-read details HERE.

Read the rest of this entry »

Certainly he’s disappointed many of his supporters.   As I said, while I more or less expected it, I felt a distinct thrill of disappointment when I read his statement.  While I realize that liberal Dems tend to tack to the right once they know they’ve got the nod, it seems a bit…previous.  We haven’t even had the convention yet.

Atrios named him Wanker of the Day; at TPM Greg Sargent called it a ‘downer.’  Yep.

The problem is, Obama can’t win if he looks ’soft’ on terrorism because the Dems have let the Republicans own the whole national security issue and define the requirements. I guess it’s too much to hope that the Dems would wrest the issue away from the right and challenge the Bush administration’s (and the nation’s) assumptions about the most effective way to fight it. Why did the left let this issue become the right’s sole property? I see it as a stunning failure of imagination as well as a failure in courage and leadership.

Realistically, it’s probably too much to expect him to take this on single-handedly right as he’s initiating his campaign for the general election. Isn’t it? I am too cynical — or, as I prefer to frame it, ‘pragmatic’ — to expect him to push a progressive platform while he’s trying to beat McCain and yet….I can’t help feeling that Edwards would have repudiated this terrible legislation. But isn’t that precisely why people said that Edwards could never win in the general? And Obama never really presented himself as an Edwards sort of progressive.

Bear in mind I don’t feel particularly inclined to defend him — he was never my choice for presumptive nominee. I am trying to understand the thinking behind this decision and to spin it in a way I can stomach.

Anyway, other bloggers’ reactions follow:

Read the rest of this entry »

Note to presumptive Republican presidential nominee: get ready for incoming fire …..Internet fire, that is. The latest assault in the Internet political war comes in the form of a “Google bomb” launched your way….

A critical key for the future viability of blogging and the future viability of the msm, that most bloggers and quite a few in the msm already understand, is the strong symbiotic relationship developed, and which continues to develop rapidly and creatively, between certain of the msm and the blogosphere…

A symbiosis is wherein two or more hosts are nourished by and from one another, reciprocally, complementarily, so that all thrive even the more. And such is all around us to see. When I drove the Pan American hiway in the 1960s, I saw many jungle orchids which had symbiotic relationship with certain trees; each literally would die without one another.

Also, here, were you to come with me up past timberline in these rock and hard packed mountains, there is a process by which tiniest micro-organisms nibble away at the roots of the bristlecone pines for nourishment. But they do not destroy these trees that are often over 2000 years old. In their microphageous puncturing the roots of the trees, the micro-organisms literally make the roots more porous so the trees can take advantage of spare rainfall and the few nutrients that manage to make it past the hardpack.

Thus too, a symbiosis between the blogosphere journalists and the msm journalists is, in prototype form, a present paradigm and it is a rich one. There has long been a symbiosis between book authors, with quotes and multi paragraph quoting accepted as fair use practice when cited consistently and well. There is also a working symbiosis between msm and book authors and book publishers for nearly 200 years. There is no obstacle that I know of, when mutual benefits are brought in good will, that ought stand between such being worked out easily and amiably between msm and bloggers.

A parasitic relationship is another form altogether. That occurs when a life form attaches itself to the host, and thrives… while the host is depleted and dies. Where I grew up in the Great Lakes, for instance, the lamprey eel fastens itself to the sides of large fish, penetrating the skin… and over time, literally sucks the guts out of the fish, killing them.

Traveling in the south, I saw huge green kudzu vines, once thought to be the saving grace remedy for loss of topsoil back during the dust bowl droughts. Thus, kudzu was imported to the south and midwest, and planted by droves. It took over, growing outside its more meek native environment (Japan, for instance). It rose like Rodan over everything. It grew so quickly, people said they could hear the vines creaking overnight. The kudzu grew so tall and so widely, it canopied entire forests, keeping the trees and flora from the sunlight. Inside the bodacious green vine over everything… inside, all the trees and ferns had gone black and dead. That’s what a parasite does. Me first, me only, me forever.

The blogosphere cannot be halted from growing and developing, but it is not like kudzu. It is a natural force in its own right, that has gathered itself into existence for expedience and creative reasons, and that has laid road and infrastructure deep into the interior where there was none before.

Giving credit to this ‘young-ancient’ force doesnt depend on whether one agrees or not with every blog’s politics. The fact is, Read the rest of this entry »

Since the 24/7 news cycle is no longer, and it’s now a minute to minute news cycle, matters of end-game negotiation or denouement that used to take months, sometimes seem to occur within moments too.

This is an update to an earlier story at TMV yesterday which ran Robert Cox’s understanding of the legal facts behind the contretemps between Associated Press and Drudge Retort. For those interested in process as much as content, the AP and the Drudge Retort have made peace. For now. The issues about who will represent bloggers as a huge worldwide group and how remains to have several solutions in place, and more, no doubt, to come.

Back Story AP and Drudge Retort Come to Terms
Posted June 20th, 2008 by Robert Cox

In what may close one chapter and signal the beginning of another, the AP and Rogers Cadenhead of Drudge Retort have come to resolution on their dispute while leaving unresolved the central source of conflict in the case - whether the verbatim publishing of an AP headline and AP lede are, or are not, covered under “fair use” doctrine.

AP also failed to provide any public guidance on their own position and Rogers is refusing to bail them out by publishing the guidance they gave him last night in resolving his concerns including the post themselves. I cannot see how AP’s approach helps them resolve the broader implications of their posture here.

It does resolve the matter for Rogers, and therefore me and Ron Coleman, which has been the goal of the MBA all along. So, maybe we can all get some sleep tonight. It’s been a long week.

No Meeting

The much anticipated meeting yesterday never happened in at least in the sense many bloggers and reporters understood it. Instead there were a flurry of phone calls as well as internal meetings at AP resulting in an outcome that while not a clear win for anyone is also not a loss for anyone either.(cpe’s itals) No “guidelines” were established, no precedents set and no one needs to spend time in court. Most importantly, the MBA was able to help Rogers Cadenhead end up with a solution that was acceptable to him and that has always been our primary concern.

Rogers has the somewhat nebulous AP statement and his own reply: AP Settles Dispute with Drudge Retort…

To read the back story to this AP/ DR episode’s conclusion, see the rest of Cox’s article here.

This is a must read, in depth article about the not well publicized facts behind AP’s go-round with the Drudge ReTort, by the venerable Robert Cox of The Media Bloggers Association… which is, according to their website, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of “blogging” or “citizen journalism” as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.

I began reading Robert Cox’s blog because the group I help represent, Authors Guild in New York, which fights for Federal and states’ rights for writers, is currently pushing back against negating forces that want the new Federal Shield Law protecting journalists and their sources, to not include protecting bloggers. Detractors say that bloggers are not journalists, or far more slyly, how can you tell if a blogger is a real journo? I have found much rich about all things bright and blogiful here at Robert’s blog WordsInEdgewise, and at Media Blogger’s Association: :

(I took the liberty of capitalizing in the headline above, the T in Drudge ReTort, since I have seen so many articles on blogs and comments this week spelling it as Drudge RePort, the site belonging to Matt Drudge… with some celebrating that Matt is taking a whupping from the big boys. He isnt. It’s the little guy. A different site altogether. Easy error to make when typing fast.)

I do have Mr. Cox’s permission in writing to make my own fair judgment about ‘fair use’ in showing you his article.

Backstory on AP - Drudge Retort Issue
by Robert Cox

In reading a small slice of the coverage of the AP - Drudge Retort contretemps it struck me that a lot of the more breathless coverage in the blogosphere stems from the rather larger misperception that one day last week, out of the blue, Rogers Cadenhead got slapped with a lawsuit by AP.

As one of the few people who has seen all the legal documents in the case and has actually read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act I can see it would be wise for some folks to cool down and acquaint themselves with the rather prosaic facts in this matter.

AP first contacted Rogers in April not June. They sent Rogers a “cease and desist” letter on April 15th which cited a couple of entries on Drudge Retort as examples of their claim that Rogers was “encouraging” copyright infringement. One of those examples was the whole text of an article and the entire headline the others were similar. Rogers failed to respond until May 14th due to a mix up with his mailing address at which point AP sent him a Take Down Notice for 14 other posts, 13 of which were whole text/exact headline posts to his site. Rogers disputed the 14th entry as fair use but took it down as required under DMCA. Rogers notified his contributor, the person who posted the content, but that person did not file a counter-claim and so the post remained removed.

So, Drudge Retort got on AP’s radar due to the posting of entire articles with exact headlines which all parties agreed constituted copyright violations two months BEFORE the most recent spate of DMCA Take Down Notices. Technically, Drudge Retort got onto AP’s radar because those posts were flagged by software used by AP called Attributor. This is a data mining spider similar to the bots and web indexers used by search engines; content companies can use it to track the use of their content on the web. It is very important that people understand this because it makes clear that the AP is not on some wild rampage through the blogosphere, lawyering up to to go after every blogger who quotes an AP story in any way. Yet that is how this story has been portrayed including by a lot of people who should know better but are having too much fun bashing AP.

In June, Rogers got more take down requests, these were not Read the rest of this entry »

Hostilities between the Associated Press and bloggers are escalating to the point that some are now vowing to stop linking to the wire service. Regardless of the merits, such conflict is unhealthy for the free flow of information in a society that depends on it.

As a part of traditional media, AP regards its output as property without distinguishing between form and substance. The arrangement of words and sentences in its reports belongs to the agency, but the news conveyed does not. The facts and public statements therein, once published, belong to everyone. “Published” literally means “making public”

Bloggers, regardless of where their information comes from, have the right to analyze and comment on news without restriction. What they may not have the right to do is cut and paste large chunks of AP stories, as some do, and add their reactions which, in some cases, amount to little more than “Oh, wow!” in either a positive or negative sense.

Even before the Internet, on-the-spot reporting was only a fraction of what MSM did. TV news often piggybacked on newspaper reporting, and magazines got most of their ideas and leads from daily news. In the future, with news bureaus being cut back for economic reasons, that will be truer than ever.

Those of us who spent a working lifetime dealing with copyrighted material have no formula for where “fair use” ends and theft begins. But context is important. If a blog post is using AP material as a taking-off point for commentary or to illustrate a point, that’s “fair use,” and a word count formula can’t be the only criterion.

For example, if this post were legally copyrighted, fair use would be characterizing it, quoting from it and expressing views but not just lifting most of it without creating some new piece of writing. But the exhilarating thing about blogging is that such property considerations are beside the point.

Beyond that, the real puzzlement in this debate is defining what damage AP believes results from having bloggers quote from its output by linking to the media that are legally using it. In what way does it devalue the product or damage those legal users? In fact, don’t they benefit from getting more traffic to their web sites?

But, all that aside, the larger issue is that, in a free society, it’s not a good idea to start treating the truth as private property.

Cross-posted from my blog.

It is just my two cents worth, but after sitting for ten years and still on The Author’s Guild Board, and the Advisory Board of the National Writer’s Union– and I only mention this because I have seen so many cases of what appears to constitute and what appears not to constitute proper usage of the ‘fair use’ clause in copyright…

this is why I say, given the outcome of the many cases I’ve seen… it ought be enough to give respect to the AP (Associated Press) and its writers to quote from them, say five paragraphs or less of a 20 paragraph+ article, to, as we most often do at TMV, credit the writer by name, block quote their words, and put the link back to the original article. In this way, as with other news sources we quote, we truly respect ‘fair use’ which generally means ‘quoting from,’ rather than taking the entire article or if originally fashioned, the heart of the article wholesale.

Here is a ‘fair use’ clause from the federal copyright law (by the way, it can be quoted in full, as you, the taxpayers own the government publications for public use):

07: Limitatons on exclusive rights: Fair Use

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phone records or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use, the factors to be considered shall include:

1.The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2.the nature of the copyrighted work;
3.the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4.the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (added pub. l 94-553,
Title I, 101, Oct 19, 1976, 90 Stat 2546)

And also this is useful

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

As I was preparing to go to law school, one of my interest areas was Intellectual Property Law, and I read and still read deeply in the subject. One of the most interesting cases revolved around the Grateful Dead museum and its holder vs authors compiling a book on the Grateful Dead. They’d applied to the museum and its owner of the artifacts there for permission to print copies of some of the vintage posters for the GD concerts. They were turned down. They printed thumbnail pictures of the posters in their book anyway… on the advice of their lawyer that it was fair use. The museum owner who had license to all matter Grateful Dead in his possession, sued. Read the rest of this entry »

It has dawned slowly on big publishing companies like HarperCollins, Bertelsmann (which owns BMG and bought into Napster with 80M,) Penguin, and other of the few conglomerates that run big publishing nowadays that the internet and the flow of info is not a threat, but a huge opportunity. It has come so slowly to their awareness that the buggy whip business model is over, the the age of the combusion engine is past too. That there is an open ore field right within their reach; the internet, those who ply its rivers, those who take from and live from the bounty of the river.

My books are published by Bertelsmann and Harper and I’ve had up close sight of so many layers of big publishing for the last 15 years, including my wanting to send a final manuscript by email in 1990 to pre-Bertelsmann Random House, and them being unable to receive the chapters… They had no email connection, and no publishing head had ever given nor required any of their editors to have a computer, let alone computer skills.

For years, as Napster and iTunes and Bezos built the equivalent of Godzilla’s internet palisades and promonitories, the big publishers, including the NYT whose editor in those times was a friend– big media management did not see the handwriting on the wall that’d been there for at least ten long years– that this was now the computer age, not the IBM Selectric age. That 1000 pages could fly through the air in minutes, instead of being carried by hand and truck and airplane over 1-5 days’ time.

Neither did they rouse to realize even though the air was thick with it… that opinions from ‘outside the castle’, questions, challenges, rumor, information, news, music, and even proprietary information, all, could be dispersed across the world in seconds, blasting right through the gatekeepers’ bastions worldwide. They didn’t get it. They just didn’t. Think of a battleship being told to turn on a dime. Not possible. Now think of bullet boats turning on a dime. Simplistic analogy, but close to what the problem was… including, I hate to say it, lack of being curious, lack of being ‘young’ observing, lack of having point men and women in the know, lack of vivid imagination in this area. And those comprised a sector to public stock have more and more reflected this lack.

So, the NYT experiencing a gross waning of their revenues from ad loss to the internet, thought it smart to convene Times Select. They appeared to be concerned people were reading the NYT online content, but not subscribing to the print edition, and therefor they’d make up that loss by charging money for anyone to read, let alone download or quote from their online articles.

I subscribed because I love the NYT, many of its writers class investigators and thinkers. However, by the time renewal came around, I’d found out I could bypass Times Select and get most articles from the NYT anyway… via Google News. That there was a gaping hole in NYT Select’s design that allowed some in for free.

Even so, as time went on, I noticed I quoted less and less from the NYT. It took too much Read the rest of this entry »

. . . Which makes calls for a boycott against The Associated Press because of its warning that using wire service content in the form of excerpts and links without payment is in violation of copyright law is misguided — or to put it in terms that some bloggers would understand, it’s plain stoopid.

I seem to be in the minority on this point of view, and there are some heavyweights like Jeff Jarvis in the majority, although Jeff later more or less came to his senses and is now proposing a link ethic between the AP and bloggers, while AP itself also has backed off.

I also happen to come by my view honestly.

That is to say that I have a pretty damned good understanding of copyright law and know a thing or three about libel, as well, after a 37-year newspaper career that included quality time spent in the offices of high-paid newspaper lawyers who were trying to extricate my paper and myself from one legal fix or another.

As it is, the blogosphere is a marvelous work in progress and legal issues such as copyright and libel are only beginning to be ironed out.

So the boycott AP crowd needs to chill and understand that reaching an accommodation with the wire service and other news organizations that get huffy about the use of their content is in their best long-term interests. And that if they insist of throwing temper tantrums they’ll get squashed like bugs by the high-paid lawyers for those outfits. And probably deservedly so.

I myself try to stay out of trouble by doing one simple thing:

Always give credit where it is due to both the primary source and the blog or website through which I might have found the primary source. This is especially pertinent when it comes to use of photographs and other images without permission, and I will hold off using an image if I cannot ascertain its owner and don’t believe it to be in the public domain.

That few bloggers have such standards, let alone any standards, says less about the Wild West nature of the blogosphere than the ignorance of many of the cowboys and cowgirls.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House. With my full permission, of course.

So it is rumored.  I have a hard time believing that they’d really try it on.  But according to Tim Conneally,  it seems that this may be what they’re thinking.

Where the group had previously invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and sent cease-and-desist orders to at least one blogger, seeking the removal of excerpted content (in some cases as few as 17 words in length), now the press service has attached an "Excerpt for Web Use" charge for passages as short as five words in length.

The pricing scale for excerpting AP content begins at $12.50 for 5-25 words and goes as high as $100 for 251 words and up. Nonprofit organizations and educational institutions enjoy a discounted rate. (BetaNews)

As Markos says, it will be the easiest question in the history of copyright law for a blogger who can afford to litigate, and you know he can.   Many blogs have decided to boycott AP content.  Kos, who can doubtless afford it and who has ‘a JD and specialized in media law,’ is going to fight back by carrying on making ‘fair’ — i.e., legal — use of their materials.

Read the rest of this entry »

You might remember my reports on the monk’s, nun’s and Burmese people’s protests in September of last year, how my contacts in Yangon (Rangoon) dried up within days as cpu’s were confiscated, cell phones smashed, communications wires cut, and various deeply good souls arrested, many children, men, women beaten, many murdered by Than Shwe’s evil orders. It was agony and remains so, not to know the fates of those specific contacts/blogger/photographers who were bravely and desperately funneling information and photos out of Burma to literally anyone who would receive them.

I pray for highly endangered bloggers and journalists and radio and broadcast press people everyday. But after such brutal crackdowns as the smug dictator Shwe’s in Burma, for instance, I dont know the storytellers’ whereabouts, if I should pray for them on earth, or perhaps they have been killed and are in heaven. So I pray for them wherever they might be, that they be given all mercy possible, that they be made invisible at just the right moments, that they somehow know we know; that they can be assured that their courage work did not fall on stones.

I would like a monument to The Unknown Bloggers of the World. I would. I am deadly serious. Those who risked their lives to tell the story. Those who gave their lives to tell the story before they were cut down.

Here is more on the hugely disturbing free-form arresting and harming of bloggers, a practice that despite public knowlege, continues without effective intervention… In this report from University of Washington, a reported 64 bloggers arrested for publishing their views in 2003, to a 192 bloggers reported arrested in 2007, the numbers only increase. It is poignant to note that ‘reported’ numbers does not include those who are maimed, disappeared, murdered. Nor does it include, as the article states, those arrested in place just like Burma where the government gives the evil eye to anyone who asks after the welfare of any citizen.

From BBC

…A University of Washington annual report….

More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.

Citizens have faced arrest and jail for blogging about many different topics, said the World Information Access (WIA) report.

Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights or suppression of protests. They criticised public policies and took political figures to task.
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Jim Windish has been covering this story as it evolved, but I thought I’d jump into the discussion, as it is an issue that concerns me greatly. I’m always uneasy when I color outside the lines — and even more so when I don’t know where the lines lie. So one part of me is glad that we’re finally having this discussion. The other part of me is asking why the AP gets to make the call.

As Steven Benen notes, ‘The AP is one of the most commonly linked tonews outlets on the planet. If bloggers can’t excerpt 79 words from an article, it’s going to have an effect.’  The thing is, once a practice becomes accepted and entrenched within a community, the members assume that it’s all right.  I understand the AP’s concern but I think they made a big mistake in waiting till the standards were well and truly entrenched and a bigger one in trying to dictate what those standards should be. Community standards aren’t the law, but an AP fiat isn’t either. . 

Anyway….talk about reaping the whirlwind.

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