Going meta on those who are going meta on the AP

The AP is the latest of old-media princesses to start flailing around in rage and desperation, because the blogging peasantry is usurping their rightful place. US and international copyright law isn't doing enough to keep the commoners handing over coin, so the AP is threatening to sue bloggers for quoting or linking to their articles.

Tech Crunch lays it all out beautifully:

...the Associated Press...went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions...frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor.

...[The AP] do not want people quoting their stories, despite the fact that such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law.

Even such natural enemies as conservative and liberal bloggers are united on the absolute shite-suckitude of AP's position. That's because this position is basically "Waaaaaah!" It's certainly not every day when a liberal blogger like me actually agrees with Conservative Yankee. His rather funny and pointed idea: bloggers should turn around and start charging the AP, for fact-checking their awful-to-the-point-of-negligence reporting.

Just doing a quick check of my content from the present back until the beginning of May, the Associated Press owes me editorial services fees of $2,580 for 1,032 words correcting AP stories dating back to May 2.

But of course, such an ideological truce is not to last forever. Not when further delicious meta-memetic ironies can turn in on each other.

Thus the liberal commoners commentators at Sadly, No! responded with an invoice, for the amount of words they've expended correcting Confederate Yankee's occasionally fact-free invective.



This is snark times snark, or snark cubed if you will. It is like candy-coated crack to me. I love the fact that such a beautifully involuted snark can even take place. That is a really beautiful aspect of the interlocking networks of information which we have now. Real beauty emerges from beneath the surface, and can be created at any level. The savage ballet of ideas in battle can now be performed on any floor, of a palace as large as we care to make it.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the AP to either snatch the lease or knock it down.