Ultimately, this lawsuit issue will shut down Free Republic. Already your "pro bono" lawyer has agreed to 1 million dollars regarding this. I'm not a lawyer, but have worked for some of the high powered ones. Upon questioning, they think you're wrong on this issue.
Dude, it is fair use. To believe otherwise is to accept the premise of LATWP - that there should be only a single electronic copy of ANY news article in existence anywhere on the planet, protected behind a pay-per-view firewall and open to Orwellian memory-hole tampering. How would you prove that LAT re-wrote an article after publication? To post the original would be a copyright violation. Get it? Once they win the lawsuit, I'm betting that microfiche storage of newspapers at university libraries goes away, and is replaced by the single online electronic copy, with the hard-copy subscription soon to follow (though the CHARGE for the hard-copy subscription won't go away - big$$$$$!!!).
www.delphi.com\frureform
for more information. Click on the start tab and look at the linked sites.
It's obvious that you're not a lawyer, and you're not a computer geek, and you're not a businessman. So what exactly are you? A whining Web naif, stuck in a backwater Net ghetto - exactly where the rest of us will end up if the media giants con the courts into their bogus "copyright" claims.
Post a paragraph of one of their articles in a manner that "offends" them and you'll be lucky to get a one or two-line email "politely asking" you to remove it and never to do it again. If you're unlucky, well - they'll already have a decision in hand, won't they?
Fool.
As for LMC - wipe the drool off your face, man - you're embarrassing yourself.