Thursday, June 19, 2008
Geese, ganders and you must be kidding
The AP has let lose a pebble of an edict that is causing huge ripples of frustration and anger all over the internet. They have decided to charge for quotations of more than 1 word, believe it or not. Hot Air posted about it here and Michele Malkin wrote about it here and Patterico wrote about it here, noting especially the enormous irony of the fact that the AP quoted from blogs when they announced their new policy. Apparently the AP goose thinks itself so sacrosanct that it cannot bear the idea of any ganders using their words other than they themselves. In the age of wikis and other shared information, this will surely not hold up under any legal testing, as Laura points out. Laura also points out that "the AP quoted 154 words of a Patterico post on [a well-known] controversy . . . [while at the same time] going after a blogger who used far fewer [than 154] words from an AP article than the AP lifted from Patterico's. . . . ." This is ludicrous. First people are arrested for cheering loudly during a graduation ceremony, and now this. The world is going mad again. Quick, someone put the axis back in place.
Labels: blogs (others'), web, words, writing
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