Colorado papers order political blog to stop quoting their stories

Yesterday I mentioned the Associated Press’s complaints against the Drudge Retort two years ago for posting excerpts from its stories, in light of Woot poking fun at the AP by demanding a fee for quoting its blog posting. A story came to my attention today that is at least vaguely related.

MediaNews and Freedom Communications, companies that own several Colorado papers, have sent a cease-and-desist order to Colorado Pols, a blog and discussion forum pertaining to politics in Colorado, demanding that it stop quoting from their stories.

(Although Mike Masnick’s editorial on the matter at TechDirt ties this to the Associated Press in that the CEO of MediaNews, Dean Singleton, is also the chair of the Associated Press, the story itself doesn’t have anything to do with the AP save for the mindset of the person in charge being the same in both cases.)

Colorado Pols is essentially shrugging and complying—and going a step further, declining to mention or link to these papers at all from this point forward. The blog notes that its ceasing to link to stories from these papers will probably hurt these papers a lot more than it will hurt Colorado Pols:

The Post and these other news outlets don’t understand that their real problem is not something they can fix with a letter from an attorney. Heck, it’s not something they can fix, period. As we started to discuss earlier, the Internet has forever removed the one thing they had a premium on: Distribution. They may think that trying to sequester their own content will somehow make it more valuable, but that horse has long since left the barn, and there’s no way to put it back. Newspapers used to have a monopoly on distribution, because if you wanted to know what was happening in your state, your country and around the world, you didn’t have a lot of options outside of your daily newspaper. But now that you can find the same story from numerous other outlets online, their monopoly on distribution of the news just doesn’t exist.

Colorado Pols then brings up an internal memo from CEO Singleton saying that his papers were going to “move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free”, instead offering premium packages to “apply real value” to it. They were also going to build a local portal to try to draw traffic away from blogs.

Perhaps a bit ominously, Colorado Pols notes:

As we have sought advice (both legal and otherwise) on this matter, it has been suggested to us that Singleton, and some like-minded newspapers, may be using our blog as a test case for a much larger assault on independent new media in general, and blogs and "feedreaders" in particular. Somebody at the Post could have just, you know, called us instead, but maybe it’s good for the economy to give more work to lawyers. If we’re the guinea pig in this little experiment, then so be it. Nobody wins in this silly confrontation, but we certainly don’t lose, either.

Although the AP claimed, in its Woot response yesterday, that its abortive quote licensing scheme wasn’t supposed to apply to blogs, it did originally try to get the Drudge Retort blog to take down excerpts of its stories. Who knows whether it might change its mind again, especially if Singleton’s plans for his papers’ content extend to the AP?

It’s a pretty common practice for blogs (such as TeleRead) to quote from stories for the purpose of providing a basis for commentary. I try not to take excessive amounts of text, and I always link back to the source, since that’s just common courtesy—but legally, I don’t have to. Taking a small portion of the whole, and commenting on it, is part of the textbook definition of fair use, and is legally protected.

(Of course, it has been TeleRead policy since the Drudge Retort affair not to link or quote stories from the AP, since there’s no point in looking for trouble.)

If an anti-blog initiative does kick off, I imagine there will be at least some who will go all the way to court to fight it out, and then we’ll see what happens. It doesn’t seem like any reasonable court could fail to find that most blogs do stay well within the legal limits.