Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton blasted bloggers, Google, and online aggregation in a fiery speech this week: “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more,” he concluded about Internet dissemination of AP stories.
Readers around the country responded, including Jeff Jarvis and Rick Edmonds. Today GalleyCat noticed an American Scholar essay by William Zinsser about how he created his celebrated writing handbook, “On Writing Well.”
Zinsser’s essay points out how ‘fair use’ makes many old media products possible, from writing manuals to history books. Check it out: “My only concern was that I would go broke paying for permission to reprint all those excerpts. But then I consulted the ‘fair use’ provision of the copyright law and found that an excerpt of 300 words or less–in a book-length work–could be used without payment. That rule was not only a financial lifesaver; it was the breakthrough that gave the book its pace.” (Via JacketCopy)