Democratic and Liberal political analysis and commentary

Bloggers like me rely on news stories from all over the planet to support and refute the points we try to make. The "fair use" law is a doctrine, inserted over the years as a result of legal cases, that seeks to clarify the use of copyrighted material.

As it applies to bloggers, simply, the law allows us to excerpt small amounts of copyrighted material and paste it into a blog post for the purposes of example or illustration. Without this law, there would be no way for a blogger to immediately seize on a piece of news and refer to it verbatim. It would be necessary to receive reprint permission, a process that would be cumbersome at best in a blogging environment.

The Associated Press is beginning to go after bloggers who use material from their stories on blogs.

This actually happened to me a few weeks ago. I posted a blog post about John McCain that contained a few poll numbers that had already widely been reported on several days beforehand. Note, that the material was not taken directly from the AP article, but by that time had been recycled a few times over.

A couple of days later, I got a weird phone message, at work, no less. None of my work contact information is listed on my blog.

"This is Jim Yendez (could have been Mendez) from the Associated Press. If you don't take down your post with our material in it, we will sue you in court." No return phone number, nada. I figured out which post he was talking about and took it down as a precaution. Most bloggers are meticulous about posting copyrighted materials, me included.

But this heavy handed approach of going after bloggers for using everyday political stories in their blog posts is definitely 1995 thinking. And going after the blogosphere is not that smart.

So, Jim Yendez, if you are out there, leave a comment and let me know how your crusade is going. Perhaps you and me and your lawyers can have a nice chat.