Recently the AP Newswire sent cease and desist letters to several lower tier bloggers threatening legal action because the bloggers had their quoted articles. They have since backed away from that and have instead insisted on payment from anyone that quotes more than four words from one of their articles. Its total BS. I'm not going to pay the AP one dime. Ever.
What the AP fails to understand is that given the way search engines work the more bloggers link to their posts the more traffic their site receives thereby increasing their ad revenues. They are in essence shooting themselves in the foot. Additionally I don't think they can win such a case in court. It wasn't that long ago that the AP had a script set up on their site that displayed links to blogs that cited their stories. Hence by turning around and suing those that they encouraged to link to their material they would in effect be guilty of attempting to entrap those same bloggers.
I may not be a lawyer but I know BS when I see it.
Thanks to Memeorandum, Locomotive Breath , and ShortWoman for linking to this post.
2 days ago
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