Newscoma

So, you think the AP flap over threatening a blogger, and trying to rewrite the Fair Use copyright law is over? Think again. This isn’t over, not by a longshot. Right from the beginning, the AP threats on against a blogger, and their desire to rewrite the particular part of copywrite law governing Fair Use, has been RIAA/MPAA-like (the AP’s statement on bloggers use is forthcoming) You know, suing P2P users for presumptively sharing files. So, here is an article on the recent opinion of the MPAA which says they should not have the burden of proof to prove someone intended to share a file.

Read the whole thing. She’s right.

As is Rex Hammock who even gives some practical advice.

This thing is going to get ugly. Very, very ugly. And I’m not feeling too optimistic about how this and other things are all connected. Terry Heaton has also been following the story.  He links to this one that hits it on the head.

The distinctions have become more academic: if 3 million people read Drudge and 65,000 read the New Republic, which is mainstream?

Silence is keeping up with a lot of this as well and Jack Lail has a ton of links over at his blog. They are two seasoned news people that get that this is a big deal.

And Sadcox says:

Excuse me while I plot a way to generate traffic for myself instead of someone else.

As bloggers, we get it. We want the eyeballs to come to our homes on the web and hang out with us. I heard Brittney Gilbert speak at last year’s Bar Camp in Nashville about the world that blogging gives us, no matter who we are. Blogging makes a big world smaller.

The Associated Press is being a bit disingenuous. This is about setting rules in a world that has very few rules and polices itself. If the AP sets guidelines then do they get a level of say so? Then what?

Seriously, then what?

Last year, Squirrel Queen and I went to the Conference for Media Reform in Memphis. Folks were talking about this then and it’s coming to fruition now.

My only suggestion is to pay attention to what’s going on in regards to blogging. In many ways it’s about control and money.

Bill Moyers quoted former Baltimore journalist and creator of The Wire, David Simon,  in his speech at this year’s conference this:

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperbacks of All the President’s Men” and The Powers that Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree – we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in The Tribune, The Sun, The Register, The Post, The Express…

Those days, although nostalgic, are over to an extent.

In this new world of media, there are new challenges.

And then there is this:

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.

There are a lot of things going on not only in the news industry but the Internet as a whole.

For me at least, it’s all connected.

This online world does not need to be comprised of the haves and the have nots.

There has to be room for everyone.