Antiwar.com Blog

In a lawsuit that epitomizes the sheer stupidity of the Old Media, and its complete ignorance of the new technology, the Associated Press is suing news-aggregation site Moreover — and parent company VeriSign — for copyright infringement for linking to its copyrighted material. The specific complaint, apparently, is that Moreover uses the lead in whatever story it links to as a means to entice the reader to click on the link and read the whole thing.

More than demonstrating complete ignorance of fair use laws, and utter cluelessness as to how the internet works, the thinking behind the lawsuit, if implemented consistently, would have put a stop to all footnoted quotations in scholarly works: after all, the authors “own” their own words and a footnote is nothing but the pre-internet equivalent of a link.

Working for Antiwar.com, a site that, in some sense, is also a news aggregator site — the model is Drudge – I really connected with this piece by Rich Ord, founder of NewsLynx:

“I remember getting personal calls and emails from virtually every site I linked to including the Wall Street Journal, Time Warner, L.A. Times and many others. The calls and emails usually started with the question, “Do you have permission to link to our articles?” Old media legal departments were clearly very green with the Internet. My typical response was, ‘No, we don’t have permission and if you would like us to stop linking and driving traffic to your site just let me know. However, we feel we have every right to link to your articles without permission because the Internet itself is based on the concept of linking.'”

If you only knew the headaches this non-issue has given us over the years. To have to deal with such clods, clumsy dinosaurs stumbling their way to extinction, went with the job. Didn’t they know we were doing them a favor by sending them traffic?

It isn’t just the Old Media mavens who just don’t get it. We had one idiot, the former Trotsky disciple-turned–neocon -turned Muslim Stephen Schwartz, who threatened to sue us for linking to a photo of his ugly mug. That photo, he screeched, isn’t our property. Well, uh, no, it isn’t – but by putting it out there on the internet, the owner voluntarily made it accessible to the world. To post it, and then object when someone stumbles  on it, is like parading around naked in front of an open window, and then complaining that your “privacy” has been violated when people begin to stare.  

The AP lawsuit represents a direct threat to the First Amendment, in that it would, in principle, lead to outlawing links without first signing some sort of agreement with the linked site. I share the concern expressed by Ord in his piece:

“What would be of concern to Google, Drudge and many others is a rogue ruling by a not-so-Internet-savvy Federal Judge that would put real restrictions on linking to news. So far, the prevailing standard has been the legal concept of fair use. Hopefully, this case is assigned to a judge who realizes that the Internet is based on links. The use of an article title and short summary has been considered fair use in past cases. However, I am not sure if the use of smaller versions of copyrighted pictures regularly used by Google News and Drudge will withstand this fair use test.”

One of the arguments being used by AP lawyers is that journalism schools teach entire courses on how to write a good lead sentence — and “stealing” them (by quoting them) ought to be a crime. Taking the argument further, we could argue that headline-writing is also a valuable art, entire courses are built around it, and to steal a headline and couple it with a link to the original material amounts to copyright infringement.

You can see where this is going. But pay-per-link is not a template that fits into the technology of the internet. Let them put up a Times-Select wall — you know, like the one that just came down — and they’ll find themselves completely isolated, lost in cyber-space, unvisited as well as unloved.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/charles/aw101107lisagraves.mp3]

Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, discusses the new House bill tweaking the power of the president to tap phones without warrants that they just gave him with the “Protect America Act,” the reduction of the rights of Americans to those of people on enemy battlefields and retroactive immunity provided to American corporations for conspiring with the government to tap without warrants.

MP3 here. (16:29)

Lisa Graves is the deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/charles/aw101107philgiraldi.mp3]

Philip Giraldi, former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance and Antiwar.com columnist, discusses his August, 2005 report about Cheney’s order to SAC to draw up plans for nuking Iran, his recent report in the American Conservative about the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Israel agreeing on war with Iran to the complete surprise of Secretaries Gates and Rice, the recent Israeli attack on Syria and his information that the target was an air defense system, the disinformation campaign in the media that the target was some kind of make-believe nuclear weapons program between North Korea and Iran, the Israeli/neocon agenda for regime change in the Middle East, and the story behind the “accidental” transfer of nuclear weapons to Barksdale.

MP3 here. (16:48)

Philip Giraldi is a former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine and columnist at Antiwar.com.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_10_10_watada.mp3]

Bob Watada discusses the case of his son Ehren, the first U.S. Army officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq, his military judge’s decision to throw the case out when it looked like he may be acquitted, attempt to try him twice for the same crime in violation of the 5th amendment to the Constitution of the United States and recent intervention by the civil federal courts.

MP3 here. (17:45)

Bob Watada is the father of Lt. Ehren Watada, the first American officer to refuse his orders to deploy to Iraq.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_10_10_lyons.mp3]

Syndicated columnist Gene Lyons discusses the demonization of Iran’s powerless president, the state of their democracy compared to the neighbors, consequences of recent elections around the Middle East, Bush’s lifelong hostility to learning, the impossibility of the American Empire’s survival of a war in Persia, possible domestic consequences, the neocon “idea” that the Iranians would take our side if we bombed them, the abject ignorance and gullibility of the American population, the rift between the Ayatollahs and al Qaeda, the fact that Iranians are human individuals and Hillary Clinton’s vote for Kyle-Lieberman, dogs, Mike Huckabee, Iran again, and Wesley Clarke’s predictions about what would happen in Iraq back in 2002.

MP3 here. (44:10)

Gene Lyons, National Magazine Award winner and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, writes a weekly column for Newspaper Enterprise Association. A Southerner with a liberal viewpoint, Lyons comments on politics and national issues with a distinct voice. Lyons has been a columnist with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1994. He previously spent five years as general editor at Newsweek, and was associate editor at Texas Monthly for a year. In 1980, he won the National Magazine Award for Public Service for the Texas Monthly article “Why Teachers Can’t Teach.” A prolific author, Lyons has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews for such magazines as Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Slate and Salon. His books include The Higher Illiteracy (University of Arkansas, 1988), Widow’s Web (Simon & Schuster, 1993), Fools for Scandal (Franklin Square, 1996) and, with Joe Conason, The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (St. Martin’s, 2000). Mozark Productions’ “The Hunting of the President,” a documentary based on the book of the same title and produced and directed by Harry Thomason, is an official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Lyons graduated from Rutgers University and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. He taught at the Universities of Massachusetts, Arkansas and Texas before becoming a full-time writer. A native of New Jersey, Lyons has lived in Little Rock with his wife Diane, an administrative vice president at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, since 1972. They have two sons.

This poignant story brings home the point of how long the invasion of Iraq has dragged on. In the spring of 2003, this blogger was a sophomore in high school. He writes:

We were supposed to be welcomed as liberators. The war was fast and efficient, the barely existent military forces of Iraq were defeated as the coalition forces made their way to Baghdad. I remember the famous clip on live TV of the Iraqi’s pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein. Those were the good old days of the war. The years to follow would be slow, painful, and expensive. I supported the war without really giving a second though to why. That’s what all the other ‘conservatives’ were calling for, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

The war continued on into Senior year with no signs of a withdrawal. Every day casualties would be reported, much like they are still. All this while shaky and messy political processes were going on, and alas, to this day, not much progress has really occurred. But the mood switched from watching the events closely, to a sort of disconnection with what was happening. We all knew it was going on, but pushed it to the back of ours minds and just continued on with our daily lives. This was the case for most, especially ignorant high school kids, though of course not for those who were receiving letters, or getting that knock on the door, from the military.

Freshman year came, and despite going to a very liberal college, and the stereotype of college students turning liberal, my thoughts were unchanged on the war. My view on it was tweaked, and followed a lot of mainstream ‘conservatives’. Yes, it wasn’t done well, and we weren’t prepared for the post-Saddam era, but it was worth it to remove that madman, and now we need to clean up the mess.

The next year, sophomore year, which was fall 2006 to spring 2007, this past year, was the most important. Looking at the Republican choices likely to run for president, I quickly became a “Rudy-guy” because he was conservative on many (sort of) issues, from the same state I was, and had a tough stance on terrorism. Then I switched around September to Fred Thompson, even though he wouldn’t declare his candidacy for another year. He was similar to Rudy in regards to Iraq and terrorism, and was well known from movie and TV roles.

From sophomore in high school to sophomore in college, this blogger remained in the neocon prowar camp. So, what happened to change his mind?

I spent the later months of winter wondering “what now?” for what I was to do with my views on politics and candidates. I didn’t agree with the Democrats plans for spending and social programs, and the Republicans proved to be shallow and not even conservative with spending and war. The historic conservative position is to be anti-war. I was hesitant to discuss the war. How can one be a Republican and not be for the war? Who ever heard of such a thing?

Another turning point came in April, and especially May. The first big debate of the 2008 Republican primary season came in May, a debate at the Reagan Library, and it was a big debut for Ron Paul. He had the courage to go on stage in front of a possibly hostile crowd, and proclaim to the country that it was OK to be a conservative and be against this needless war.

So much has happened since then. The election cycle is heating up, and a paradigm shift is now in play. Republicans are coming out in increasing number saying they do not support this war. The success of Ron Paul recently is forcing a shift towards more constitutional and libertarian values. To think, if Paul had said any of these things during the 2002 or 2004 elections, he would’ve been laughed off the stage. Sure, he hasn’t gotten a good reception from the pro-war Republicans, and the process of convincing them will be hard, but the position that you can oppose the war and be a conservative now has grounding, and perhaps that is a reason why so many ‘conservatives’ are now annoyed with him.

Being someone who has seen both sides of the aisle, the “neocons” as many call them, and the anti-war Republicans, I have found that the neocon path was the more mindless one. My views were dominated by what the media was spewing out, and they all wanted this war. I didn’t think for myself much during that time, and when I did I just felt indifferent. This is not an issue one can feel indifferent for.

Now the attention has turned towards Iran. Sean Hannity is giving his list of reasons to attack them nightly on Hannity & Colmes. All the ‘conservatives’ are calling for military action. Whether they get what they want again or not, I will rest knowing that their numbers will be at least one fewer this time.

Read the rest.