Media threaten linking bloggers

Lawrence Lessig bashes the syndicators of the Bill O’Reilly column who accuse a blog of “unauthorized linking”. But that’s not the only recent case. Not long ago Tulsa World had a somewhat similar approach and sent cease and desist orders to Michael Bates, a blogger who linked to the newspaper’s website and reproduced portions of that content on the blog, an act most possibly considered fair use.

As Rhetorica reports:

This is nonsense, of course. And it’s made worse by the fact that newspapers such as the TW do the same thing every day, i.e. comment on published material.

Tulsa World responds.

Footnote: The pdf that Bates linked to in this post, has been replaced by a pdf with the message “PDF permission denied”.

Update: An article in Bergens Tidene last weekend (in Norwegian only) addresses the topic about legal and illegal linking. Via “thinking with my fingers“.