From a legal perspective—or any other perspective that believes in the development of, and adherence to, normative approaches to regulating behavior—SAI’s excerpting policy is eminently unsatisfying. (“In the eye of the beholder”? “We excerpt others the way we hope others will excerpt us”? Someone get Potter Stewart!) But, really, the SAI policy makes sense: it assumes a give-and-take relationship between not just authors and readers, but between authors and authors. It assumes evolution rather than finality in individual pieces of journalism. It assumes that authors prefer the aggregate to the atomized. When it comes to the Web, what could be more appropriate?
The Kicker
11:11 AM - March 2, 2009
Link Again
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
If cable is dying, why is it still making so much money?
The story behind one of the best business models in the country
What TVGuide.com watchlist data reveals about the season’s new dramas
“What was once genre is now the Zeitgeist”
Josh Barro, the loneliest Republican
What to make of the 28-year-old columnist’s contempt for the GOP—and its would-be reformers
Dowd and Fournier and countless others who have launched similar complaints are asking, “Why aren’t we getting what we were promised?”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
You may find the appeal to "the eye of the beholder" to be "unsatisfying" from a legal perspective, but that is actually the law. Fair use is, and always has been, left basically undefined in copyright law, although the law does list certain considerations that a court should take into account when defining "fairness" in a particular case. And this is probably inevitable--the world, and the ways in which copyrighted material can be cited, quoted, or otherwise used, is too complicated and varied to make a clean, simple, unvarying definition of "fair use" practical. This "fuzzy line" is NOT a by-product of the new digital technologies or the world of "links"--it's the way fair use has always been treated legally.
#1 Posted by Karl Weber, CJR on Mon 2 Mar 2009 at 05:30 PM