AP sends cease and desist letters to Drudge Retort - "don't quote and link us"

Sorry, was a bit preoccupied with the whole keeping up with the Cannes gossip thing - I'm missing a big chunk of fresh news here namely: (NYT) The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them.

I found that via Barbarism Begins at Home who asks "Who needs the Associated Press?" and says:

agree with Jeff Jarvis when he writes “Isn’t it a better service to reader and journalist to link directly to the original reporting?” In fact it is, which is why recently I’ve been linking much more often to the original reporting in my (sadly struggling) home newspaper. (I really wish they would pay me to give them a website like the Lawrence Journal-World’s, because that’s the only thing that’s going to save them: a complete transformation from a once-a-day regurgitation of news articles to a real community resource.)

We've long been discussing how to quote without messing with someone else copyright here, and in our old FAQ we explained how to quote right - ie; never do it without adding something of your own, and don't quote more than 30% of any given article + always link source. I've still had a few reporters pissed at me emailing me to ask if I could shorten quotes and such, so it's very interesting to me to see how this is going down and what will happen. Especially now that sites that are pure link+quite and then no original commentary, just discussion are around. (think DIGG and the likes)