That Magic Dolphin Ain't Free, Kid

Damn bloggers are stealing all the magic dolphins.

When the popular New York business blog Silicon Alley Insider quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal column in mid-February, the editor added a caveat at the end: "We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you."

The editor added "in advance" because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. The excerpt was published with the assumption that it would be permitted under the "fair use" statute of copyright law.

You can usually get Noonan for free anyway, which is far too expensive at the price. I would say you shouldn't be citing more than a paragraph of Noonan, though, for public health reasons.

An excerpt and a link should do for fair use generally. I don't see how that cuts into anyone's bottom line. This though looks ominous:

Cablevision, the owner of the Newsday newspaper, said Thursday that it would “end distribution of free Web content.” Hearst, the owner of 16 newspapers, said Friday that it would charge for some content on its Web sites.

Newsday used to be a great paper with excellent NYC politics coverage, but then it got gutted for the usual corporate asshole reasons. Charging for the watered down content is not going to do anything but hurt traffic and make the advertising situation, bad as it is, much worse. But that's cool. We'll still be able to read what Peggy noonan and Glenn Reynolds think about the world without paying a dime for the privilege.