Quoting

I don't care how much of star journalist is Scott Hansell (whom I've met before when he has covered Net Art events here in New York City). Scott ought to know better than to publish something like this :

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

I think this is part of the reason why he never seemed to get Net Art : He really doesn't understand that quoting, re-mixing and mashups are intrinsic to the vernacular of the digital age. That quoting is an essential part of showing "the real deal", of presenting things unadulterated and unfiltered so that when a blogger or an net.artist creates their own interpretation of that source, it allows for the readers, commenter and art audience to parse the quote from the interpretation and, in their own way, to render their judgement and interpretation.

Having a piece of the original is absolutely imperative in the age of reproduction. In the blogosphere for some, quoting is the version of a courtroom's witness box. Nobody was better at that than Steve Gilliard. Steve would present, if possible, the entire article before proceeding to fisk the writer's thesis and shred their logic to pieces. Yet the quote and link back to the source without alteration allowed for Steve's readers to have access the source's words right there and at that moment, giving them the opportunity to render as fair a judgement as possible.

The other way of quoting is more akin to cooking.

Rogers Cadenhead, founder and publisher of The Drudge Retort, has been Cease and Desisted by AP News for publishing fragments of their syndicated news articles and reports.

Yes, fragments, not the whole articles. Go to Rogers' site to read the reasons given by AP.

Adding a quote to a blog post is very much like the sampling of a hook or a beat on a song. It's why so many people were opposed to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's not only that albums like Beck's Odelay or Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet would never had happened. Documentaries, archival works, opinion or scholarly writing would be all but non-existent if it means that now journalists, bloggers, historians and scholars would need to pay publishing houses for every single quote and/or sample they need for their work.