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Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the Internet, reports said on Wednesday. Internet is widely used in Iran despite restrictions on access and the blocking of thousands of websites with a sexual content or deemed as insulting religious sanctities and promoting political dissent. Blogging is also very popular among cyber-savvy young Iranians, some openly discussing their private lives or criticising the system. Human rights groups have accused Iran of making excessive use of the death penalty but Teheran insists it is an effective deterrent that is carried out only after an exhaustive judicial process. More

from Digital Journal
For example, Markos Moulitsas, founder of one of the largest liberal websites online called the Daily Kos, is going head to head with them hoping they will take this to court. Kos as he is known, quoted 120 words from an AP article and then states, “Hey AP — that’s 120 words. Have your lawyers call my lawyers.”

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

Enter Michelle Malkin, a popular conservative website, has been quoted extensively by the AP, who never bothered to link to her original pieces, nor paid her a dime for the usage.

Patterico’s Pontifications has been quoted extensively by the AP as of late…. with no payment and in another post he gives people one more option for fighting back against the AP, to use their quotes, within the bounds of the law’s fair use policy, and just do not link to them at all, he says.

Don’t refuse to quote them.

Just don’t link them.

There’s no law that says you have to link what you quote. Just use a quote that fits within fair use, do your commentary, and deny them the link.

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Also See:
AP is an endangered species

Photo courtesy of Drama Queen

The average paid weekday circulation of eighteen out of twenty of the nation’s top newspapers saw a decline for the six-month period ending in March, as reported today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years according to figures from the Newspaper Association of America. Nielsen Online’s Top 30 News Sites listed The Drudge report as number 1, followed by Daily Kos, Fox News Digital Network, CNN Digital Network and AOL News, ranking in the top 5.

While a handful of news sources dominate the web, still bottlenecking information as did print and broadcast media, the playing field’s been leveled considerably. Options for alternative news are there. All we have to do is search for them. Citizen journalism and Blogs have skyrocketed in recent years; bloggers are reshaping the information landscape into a powerful horizontal structure, empowering its readers with unbiased views on world events, politics, books, music, consumer advice and non-vested interest opinions. Powerful corporations take this exploding trend very seriously by monitoring the daily activity in the blogosphere with companies like BlogPulse who analyze, report, and track key issues, people, news stories, news sources, blog traffic flows from discussions, and conversations.

As Mark Toner points out:

Consider the well-documented attacks on the Church of Scientology by “Anonymous,” a group of hackers and activists who’ve delighted in posting confidential documents and unflattering stories about the Church in recent months. Or Wikileaks, which invites a global audience of whistleblowers to post documents to an “uncensorable” and “untraceable” site for “maximum public impact.” Some 1.2 million documents, including information about alleged human rights violations and military interrogation procedures, are posted on the site, which in March won a U.S. court victory that attracted amicus briefs from the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Gannett and the Society of Professional Journalists, among other groups.

Photo by .A.A.
Noah Shachtman, in a piece for Wired, writes, “A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested ‘clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers. This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, ‘Blogs and Military Information Strategy,’ introduces the military audience to the ‘blogging phenomenon,’ and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces — specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units — might use the sites to their advantage.”

In other words, a propaganda campaign.

From the report:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence… to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

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