I hope that readers here will take the time to read the linked OMC post.

What struck me as I read it, and which goes to the crux of why bloggers are such a threat to professional "journalists" is the part where the KOIN news director described her duty, as news director, as including protecting KOIN's "brand". Obviously protecting a brand has nothing whatever to do with actual journalism.

Let me follow up on my own thought by adding that the fact that the KOIN news director's boss(es) are apparently requiring her, as news director, to protect their brand says a whole heck of alot about the state of legacy journalism today!

This is inside baseball that non-bloggers may not care about ... but I do! I'll add my own tale. I was threatened for quoting passages from a newspaper on my union blog. It was a strange, murky, ham-handed threat, and the clear purpose was just to bully me into taking down material. I responded tartly, mentioning that in my capacity as the founder and an editor of BlueOregon, I had never had the paper thus threaten me. What was the criteria for quoting, and what was out of bounds? They didn't know. I got a response to my first request which was more a wheedling cry to remove the stuff, and then radio silence.

What struck me was that this must have been going on elsewhere. Surely other bloggers--less well-connected than I--had also been threatened. If they pushed back, did the paper back down, or was it prepared to take this to a legal level?

I think we're in the stage where bullying is the primary tactic. We'll see what develops down the road. I for one welcome a nice, public debate about fair use, bullying, and attempts by corporations to silence individuals. It should prove MOST interesting.

I've had one "take down" request which did frighten me in the exact same way that the KOIN apparent threat to the OMC blogger was threatening. But... I complied and didn't lose any sleep over it.

It was several years ago at another blog by and for political independents. I'd get these emails every now and then from someone claiming to be the press secretary (or some such) for author John Avlon, who was then a columnist and associate editor of the NY Sun and is a known cheerleader of/for political independents. So it seemed legit. The email offered me use of as much as I wanted of a piece he'd written (for the upcoming edition of the Sun) on my blog - this piece to be precise.

Not being an attorney I just went with what I thought I understood of the relevant case law and reposted the entire piece at this old blog of mine.

No problems for a year or two but then one day I got an email from the NY Sun asserting that my post was an infringement of their rights and that I needed to take it down immediately or face legal consequences. I took it down immediately and then emailed the Sun back explaining the circumstances under which I'd originally posted it.

My understanding was (and is) that an author can give permission to use something they authored because it is their intellectual property. After that the next line of legal ownership belongs to whatever entity the piece was written for.

By the time I got the "take down" order everything in the post was very old news and it frankly was no longer useful to me. So, I didn't feel like I was losing any sort of important free speech rights since it'd long since fallen off the radar screen of both me and my readers.

However, in hindsight it seems to me that I received the "take down" order right around or after the time Avlon quit the Sun to move onto whatever he did next. It didn't occur to me at the time, but now I'm thinking that the Sun didn't try to pressure me before that because Avlon did in fact have a legal right to grant me reprint permission and that the later "take down" order was about intimidation.

I amazed that a group of dedicated people, like those at Blue Oregon, can write better stuff than the Oregonian in a lot of cases -- and for free! It must be embarrassing. You can do with a url what they have to pay hundreds of people to put out. They are different animals, the Oregonian and this site for example, but you get my point.

Legacy media will adapt to the new media or die trying, it is not the other way around. We are not adapting back to high overhead costs, giant egos and and a dwindling readership. That is their reality -- not ours!

So is it a death match or humane euthanasia? I vote put the ol' girl down painlessly and take all their lawyers.