Fair use and not, again

Good comments on my previous post on news copyrights.

Jonathan Peterson writes, "even if I DO license the 5 words, I can be sued if I use those 5 words to criticize AP reporting."

I'm not an AP licensee. Why? One example: the company's reporting on energy is pretty much useless. The usual, "Republicans say, Democrats say" stenography, without the relevant facts. Look at this:

"With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, saying the United States needs to increase its energy production. Democrats quickly rejected the idea.

'There is no excuse for delay,' the president said in a statement in the Rose Garden. With the presidential election just months away, Bush made a pointed attack on Democrats, accusing them of obstructing his energy proposals and blaming them for high gasoline costs. His proposal echoed a call by Republican presidential candidate John McCain to open the Continental Shelf for exploration."

AP customers pay good money for this? The AP, I'm sure, gets the quotes right, word for word, but—except for which side in some Washington, DC argument said what—you don't know anything after reading the story that you didn't know before you read it.

How much oil do geologists think is under the continental shelf, and how much does the USA use in a year? Look to Wikipedia, and you get a useful fact: the country has three years' worth of proven oil reserves in the ground.

Look to the "Raising Kaine" blog and you get more useful information: there's another estimated 1.5 billion barrels under the ocean off Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Here's a useful Mainstream Media story from David Lightman at McClatchy Newspapers: "Annual American oil production is about 1.8 billion barrels, and the Interior Department estimates that as much as 19 billion barrels remain untapped in coastal areas currently off limits to drillers."

Try to run all the cars in the USA on domestic oil, even if you add in the coasts, and someone who signs a car loan today could still be making payments when the oil runs out. But the AP just gives us dueling soundbites without the information to put them in context. Sure, no Professional News Organization is going to work from Wikipedia, but they could have made their own behind-the-firewall wiki with this kind of basic stuff by now. AP's actual energy reporting stinks of corporate sloth, which is a failure smell worse than any copyright shenanigans.

The AP has no business using copyright law to defend its failure to fill in the backup information on the subject the politicians are talking about. But still—just cutting and pasting is not blogging, and it's not necessarily fair use. Being for copyright balance and the right to quote other people's writing in the context of criticism or discussion doesn't necessarily mean that mindless copying is fine.

Is this spam blog fair use? No. Would it be fair use if it just copied the headline and one sentence? No. A corporation can spew dumb bluster about copyright and still be right on a copyright issue.

Syndicated 2008-06-18 23:42:31 from dmarti's blog