AP might get more than it bargained for

LGF links to a posting at Confederate Yankee where AP defines "fair use" a bit better for bloggers to stay on the right side of the law:

AP licenses its works (photos, news stories, video and so on) to newspapers, Web sites and broadcasters for the purpose of showing news events and to illustrate news stories or commentary on the news events.

If the entirety of the work is used (such as when a whole photo is reproduced), that is considered a substantial “taking” under fair use law. If there are many photos used, that is a substantial taking of AP’s photo library.

In the case of criticism, the commentary or criticism has to be about the protected work, not commentary or criticism in general – not using, as in the case of Snappedshot.com, protected photos to illustrate something on which the blogger was commenting. One cannot post a copyrighted photo of President Bush to illustrate commentary criticizing the policies of his administration, for example.

This makes a certain amount of sense, but what is going to happen is what I did in a previous posting today: make a story about something outrageous that happened into a story about media bias, by criticizing either the staging of the picture or the caption, thereby killing two birds with one stone.

So, for example (this one was on LGF as well):

Palestinian Hamas activists take part in an anti-Israel rally organized by the Hamas movement in Gaza March 7, 2008.

Not only am I showing how civilized Gazans are in tolerating a march of people dressed as suicide bombers in their midst, but now I must also mention how (in this case Reuters) calls these people "activists", on par with people who work hard to open libraries on weekends!

So a higher percentage of my blog posts, and those of others, are going to necessarily end up pointing out media bias that has been largely ignored because it is so widespread, in order to keep to the correct side of the "fair use" issue.

Another example coming up!