Thursday, December 9, 2010

All The News

It happens that another newspaper group has decided that there's more money in suing people than in trying to furnish news. The model for this line of thought is Righthaven, who owns the copyright tights to everything a national group of birdcage liner producers publishes, and will sue for big bucks if you so much as quote a single line on a blog.

My thought on this is that pointing out bias and errors in the MSM is too much like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel, and as long as a blogger never runs out of material critical of a paper, the blogger will prosper, and the paper will bleed subscribers. Lawsuits are a great way to stifle criticism, especially if the blogger doesn't have the deep pockets of a paper.

To that end, another group, MediaNews Group, has gotten on the bus. Their membership includes the local rag, Pravda On The Platte, so no more subsidies from casa Billll for them.

For local (to me) news, may I recommend Complete Colorado, which styles itself after Drudge, but specializes in Colorado news.

2 comments:

Brad K. said...

I see the troll demands that the Drudge Report relinquish it's domain name.

How is that for cajones?

I wonder if it is time yet for anti-trust complaints about the trolls.

Billll said...

I would think that there was grounds for a lawsuit pointing out that while the media is entitles to copyright protection on its stories insofar as someone else shouldn't be allowed to copy them and publish them in, say another media outlet, there comes a point where commentary or criticism on the articles in question should not be disallowed, and a minimal amount of quotation, with attribution, should be permitted.