DMCA - Digital Millenium Copyright Act

So Kos uses his blog, just like Michelle Malkin, to parachute on the AP controversy and call himself a hero. In the post not only does he quote an AP article (something I had done earlier that day for fisking purposes), but proceeds to dump on both Rogers Cadenhead, Bob Cox and Ron Coleman for having the temerity to talk with the AP about guidelines :

"The dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association, of course, are walking right into that meeting because they crave nothing more than creating the impression that they, you know, represent bloggers (they don't)."

This, mind you, after the fact that Rogers had asked for those guidelines. Here's the back story :

Yesterday was intense day that I think was made worse by an article written by Scott Hansell over at The New York Times. Not only did he describe bloggers as "free wheeling", but Hansell made it look like the boycott started by netroots bloggers that spread through the blogosphere was going to be over once the Associated Press had discussions "with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association" that would produce "guidelines" to impose on bloggers.

We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them.

The last paragraph is not only the other (after the free wheeling adjective) offending point of this article. It gets picked up by none other than The Associate Press, which goes on to "report" (and here I am breaking to boycott in order to fisk them)

NEW YORK - The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

Jim Kennedy, the AP's director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP "doesn't get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows."
FULL ARTICLE AND SOURCE

It is outrageous that the AP, with the help of one of it's members (The New York Times), is spinning this Thursday as some sort of workshop that they will use, with the help of the Media Bloggers Association, to tell bloggers what is Fair Use.

And it is what I was twittering about with Jay Rosen last night. Jay and I reckoned there was what it seemed a "diffusing" element to the way the news were being report from Hansell down. He picked up on it as "the journalists' attempt to calm things down". I described as "there's an interesting diffusing dynamic going on, starting @ NYT" that had been preceded by the following twitts :

blogdiva: @jayrosen_nyu what a lot of your media peeps fail to mention is that no matter what AP says about use of their content there'll be a boycott
about 10 hours later · Reply · View Tweet

blogdiva: @jayrosen_nyu the boycott is not going to end after Ap meets the MBA because the issue here is that they don't get to say what is fair use
less than a minute later · Reply · View Tweet

It wasn't until after I spoke with Robert Cox that it hit me : Yes, indeed, people are reading these as "appeasement" quotes from AP. It does look like the article are meant to diffuse the issue and they're doing so by using Robert Cox's meeting as part of their damage control.

We will deal here with the first part of the discussion which is about Rogers' C&D, the agreement he brokered with the AP and the Thursday meeting. The second part, which is about the reorganization of the Media Bloggers Association and how to become a member will be posted separately.

I don't care how much of star journalist is Scott Hansell (whom I've met before when he has covered Net Art events here in New York City). Scott ought to know better than to publish something like this :

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

I think this is part of the reason why he never seemed to get Net Art : He really doesn't understand that quoting, re-mixing and mashups are intrinsic to the vernacular of the digital age. That quoting is an essential part of showing "the real deal", of presenting things unadulterated and unfiltered so that when a blogger or an net.artist creates their own interpretation of that source, it allows for the readers, commenter and art audience to parse the quote from the interpretation and, in their own way, to render their judgement and interpretation.

Having a piece of the original is absolutely imperative in the age of reproduction. In the blogosphere for some, quoting is the version of a courtroom's witness box. Nobody was better at that than Steve Gilliard. Steve would present, if possible, the entire article before proceeding to fisk the writer's thesis and shred their logic to pieces. Yet the quote and link back to the source without alteration allowed for Steve's readers to have access the source's words right there and at that moment, giving them the opportunity to render as fair a judgement as possible.

The other way of quoting is more akin to cooking.

Rogers Cadenhead, founder and publisher of The Drudge Retort, has been Cease and Desisted by AP News for publishing fragments of their syndicated news articles and reports.

Yes, fragments, not the whole articles. Go to Rogers' site to read the reasons given by AP.

Adding a quote to a blog post is very much like the sampling of a hook or a beat on a song. It's why so many people were opposed to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's not only that albums like Beck's Odelay or Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet would never had happened. Documentaries, archival works, opinion or scholarly writing would be all but non-existent if it means that now journalists, bloggers, historians and scholars would need to pay publishing houses for every single quote and/or sample they need for their work.

From the brilliant people of Gizmodo :
Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are: Boycott the RIAA in March - Gizmodo:

Alright, we've been following the RIAA's increasingly frequent affronts to privacy and free speech lately, and it's about time we stopped merely bitching and moaning and did something about it. The RIAA has the power to shift public policy and to alter the direction of technology and the Internet for one reason and one reason alone: it's totally loaded. Without their millions of dollars to throw at lawyers, the RIAA is toothless. They get their money from us, the consumers, and if we don't like the way they're behaving, we can let them know with our wallets.

With that in mind, Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month. We want to get the word out to as many people as humanly possible that we can all send a message by refusing to buy any album put out by an RIAA label. Am I saying you should start pirating music? Not at all. You can continue to support the artists you enjoy and respect in a number of ways.

The campaign is simple. Basically boycott anything put out by Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), the companies that fund the RIAA and their ridiculous campaigns.