I’ve always wondered whether or not the good old-fashioned interdict would hurt or help:
The stories over the weekend were bad enough – the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submisisons. Drudge Report is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor.
After heavy criticism over the last few days, the A.P. is in damage control mode, says the NYTimes, and retreating from their earlier position. But from what I read, they’re just pushing their case further.
…
So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
A hypothetical: What if Americans divided their news between several competing columnar sources? One American reads only the left-leaning news, another the right-leaning news, one reads only sources such as the AP, and yet another reads exclusively open-sourced media.
How do they converse?