By now most of you have probably heard about the AP's use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the Drudge Retort. While I think that their use of about twelve percent of the AP's stories was probably fair use in the strictest legal sense of the term, I am actually a bit sympathetic to the Associated Press. Not for the reasons shown in this case, but rather because there are still bloggers who have a habit of reproducing most, if not all, of a mainstream media story on their blogs without adding much of anything to it.

My sympathy is largely [clarification: all but entirely] abstract. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a link from Instapundit to another blog and all I found was a few pithy comments below a large chunk of excerpted text. It's a writer of rare talent who can pull that sort of thing off in a way that adds any value, and the closest thing I've seen with that is when Vox Day takes a potshot or two that is just amusing at a story.

**UPDATE**: And this would be why I so strongly qualify my sympathy for the mainstream media as something more abstract than real. While the AP plays the saddest song on the littlest violin in the whole wide world, it gets caught doing not only the very thing it is upset about, but does it even worse than those it targeted!