[Jim Robinson]

It felt real strange getting a cease and desist letter from the Tribune-Review.

[TheBigB]

excerpt: A passage or segment taken from a longer work, such as a literary or musical composition, a document, or a film.

Definitely an organized campaign. But I have no problem with excerpting.

After all, posting every word in an article except the last one would certainly fall under the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary given above. :) Heh, heh, heh...

[jnarcus]

Where's the Western Legal FOundation when we need them most...or Larry Klayman or that group that Pat Robertson got going with a name that is a counterpart to ACLU (I think maybe the ACJL)?

[Prime Choice]

I concur with others who posit that this turn of events is part of a larger, orchestrated campaign.

To that end, it may be worthwhile to determine if these same papers have lowered the hammer on sites such as DU and similar.

If they haven't (and I doubt they have), I believe you have cause for filing a legal complaint. A company cannot enforce its copyright capriciously. If they allow one outfit (such as DU) to copy their articles in full with no agreement aforehand, then they do not have much of a leg on which to stand in their complaints against Free Republic.

In the meantime, now would be a good time to educate people on excerpting, summarizing, and outlining specific salient points rather than regurgitating the first 100 words of any given article. Otherwise these excerpts will prove useless once the original link vanishes.

[sweetliberty]

Probably completely unrelated, but I had a bunch of port scan attacks detected yesterday by my firewall. When I had them traced, most were coming from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and there were 2 others from news sources, one in Florida and I forget where (and what) the other one was. I thought it odd at the time. Then you posted this last night. I keep FR open all the time the computer is on, which is most of the time and I'm on cable modem. I wonder if others here have experienced anything similar and if it is in any way related.

[Willie Green]

It felt real strange getting a cease and desist letter from the Tribune-Review.

They have a corporate libertarian slant, Jim,
not truly as conservative as one might think.
Freedom of speech for the hoi polloi is secondary.

[Congressman Billybob]

Jim, here's a thought. In political science courses in two univiersities I've attended, sometimes copies of articles were used as part of the class assignments. There were apparently no quarrels from the publishers of those articles.

Therefore, the suggestion is to find a friendly professor at a university, who has a monster computer. Then the whole articles might be archived there, to protect the content of FR when the links to the original publishers go dead.

To protect the academic nature of this process, replacing the dead lines to newspapers and magazines could be open only to designated researchers, rather than everyone and anyone on FR. (If a renewed interest cropped up in an old thread with a link that has died, the researcher could go in, and make an additional excerpt that would address the renewed interest.)

This would not be just a gimmic. It could be legitimate and could work.

John / Billybob