Free Republic

Our list of sites that must be excerpted due to copyright concerns continues to grow, but now the Associated Press is upping the ante. Not only are they not allowing full text postings, they're threatening to sue bloggers who allow the posting of AP titles and brief excerpts or even if their posters post brief quotes from AP articles within a discussion thread. AP is now developing their own rules for fair use and will decide when, how and what they will allow the public to quote from their articles. And their rules are much more restrictive than is commonly...

This is our Boston tea Party. The Associated Press wants to levy a $12.50 and up license fee (aka extortion fee) on any blogger who quotes more than 4 words from one of their propaganda pieces. This is an outrageous attempt to control the blogosphere and free speech itself. To hell with their license fee and to hell with the AP. Any AP article that gets posted to FR will be jettisoned into the harbor posthaste. Please do not post any AP material to FR excerpted or not.

Bloggers, like me, are voicing their views and commentary on the news (and falsehoods, etc) of the day as is our right under the constitution.  When a corporation tries to tell me I cannot comment, criticize (and more often correct) their lousy product I lose all interest in being reasonable.  There are lines you do not cross because they cannot be uncrossed. The-news-source-that-shall-not-be-named, which went after bloggers for excerpting and linking their biased and error prone ‘news’ articles, crossed that line - in full hypocrisy it seems: 1. The AP is essentially arguing that anyone who excerpts 33 to 79...