Thanks for your suggestions. One thing I’ve got noticed is banks plus financial institutions know the spending routines of consumers plus understand that a lot of people max out and about their own credit cards around the holidays. They sensibly take …

I don’t think I made my point clearly:

“Make art legal”

A lot of art reuses prior art by taking plot points, characters, quotations, images and music segments and makes a new work from these elements.

In the restricting world of the DCMA such art is illegal.

Almost all the classic Disney animated movies are re-workings of stories in the public domain: mostly the Brother Grimm.

It’s this type of folk art I would like to see legally defended and protected from large corporate threats of law suits. Think of the the Stars Wars spin offs (fan created art) that we’re restricted by Lucas Film to protect their “rights”.

That’s what I mean by “make art legal”… I view the issue from the point of view of the single creative that wants to re-mix culture.

Making money from the art has always been the major problem the art must deal with. Now, the artist must deal with people that thin they are taking money from them through re-use.

“Send lawyers, guns and money.”

“Make art legal”

Uh, it already is.

It’s just that the freetards don’t want to pay for it – or do something better. That ain’t hard with news.

“The point of complaining about it is to send the message that this is bad behavior and we won’t tolerate it.”

Uh huh. Then whatcha gonna do?

Even if every blogger boycotts AP, then AP will carry on just as they did before. You can “declare war” and you can stamp your feet, and you can huff and puff – and none of it matters.

“Content bullying under the DMCA has gotten atrocious, if indeed it was ever not. What a total disaster of a law, penned at just the time that copyright policy should have shifted even more in favor of consumers than the already well-protected producers.”

Uh huh. Then whatcha gonna do?

Hey, maybe you can “send another message” – that everyone ignores again.

Reread my earlier post. The way to make AP go away and give up is to create better news. There must be someone smarter and more curious than the AP goons. Like I said, is that so hard to imagine?

For you, it seems, it is.

But keep sending those messages! They’re really gonna work.

“[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism.” Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841)

Fair Use was intended to allow a critcal reviewer to embed segments of copy protected works in a review. The nature of “Drudge Retort” does NOT meet this criteria. It embeds text from AP without any surrounding critical analysis.
As such it does not meet the intent of Fair Use, IMHO.

Of course, I would like to see the law modified to allow quotations for copy protected works in all fields: text, music, photography and video.
This would enbale the individual to create mashups, collages, new mixes and documentary video using the new personal digital creative desktop and on-line tools (blogs, downloads, podcats, etc).

One can only hope that we see such a shift in the next few years.

Make art legal. Historical examples are numerous and most pass the fair use defense:

Picasso’s Guernica used segments of a a newspaper.
and munber of “Variations on a Theme by…”
any song that sounds like Chuck Berry wrote it: “Back in the USSR”

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagarism?

Larry Lessig on the SCOTUS, please.