Free Republic

Roseanne Barr unleashes on those who took the vaccine and tells the truth in some brilliant stand up comedy.

Several newspapers and The Associated Press have settled a copyright infringement lawsuit against the operator of a collection of Web sites, the news organizations announced Friday. The Police News Publishing Co., Breck Porter and six affiliated Web sites had been accused of accessing the news content of the organizations without their authorization and posting it on the Web sites, where advertising appears. The content was then archived; the archiving, publication, distribution and display of the content all violated the news organizations' copyright, according to the suit. Porter, of Galveston, was the editor of the various Web sites. In addition to...

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.

No money changed hands but Rogers Cadenhead, who owns the Retort, evidently agreed to tweak the offending posts to bring them into compliance with the AP’s guidelines. And what might those guidelines be? He’s not saying. Yet. I spent around two hours yesterday talking to AP attorneys about their specific objections to the user blog entries in dispute, going line by line through the text to pinpoint exactly where they have intellectual property concerns in the short excerpts that were posted. I won’t reveal the details of this discussion until AP releases the guidelines for bloggers that it promised on...

I don't blame the Associated Press for refusing to participate in a conversation about its attempts to overthrow government authority and rewrite copyright law its own liking. The AP is like a husband who foolishly told his wife that the new jeans do make her butt look big. The best way to limit damage at that point is to simply shut up and hope the subject eventually goes away. But this issue isn't going away. The AP is doing nothing less than attempting to unilaterally rewrite copyright law, and also undermine citizens' freedom to criticize the news media. It's just...