Several newspaper groups in Colorado have issued cease-and-desist letters to bloggers, ordering them to quit using their content on their blog sites. Here’s what the site ColoradoPols has to say:
You might have noticed that the principal authors of Colorado Pols have not cited The Denver Post, or several other newspapers in the state, for some weeks. We’re sorry to tell you it’s not an oversight or laziness on our part, but the result of legal action threatened against us by MediaNews (owners of the Post, Boulder Daily Camera, Ft. Morgan Times, Lamar Ledger, and Sterling Journal-Advocate), Freedom Communications (Colorado Springs Gazette), and Swift Communications (owners of a number of small-market papers in Colorado – all are listed at the bottom of this post). We stopped citing these sources soon after receiving a “cease and desist” letter, while we evaluated our options and sought legal advice.
They go on to say that they don’t see how citing a few paragraphs of a newspaper can be considered stealing intellectual property when the papers are already giving the content away free online:
Not only are we posting only a few paragraphs from stories THAT ARE ALREADY FREE FOR EVERYONE ONLINE, we have gone out of our way to name the publication, highlight the author in particular, and provide a clear link to the story. Legally speaking, we don’t actually need to do any of this, but we’ve always tried to be symbiotic Internet purveyors and give credit where credit is due (incidentally, the Post almost never links to us or even mentions Colorado Pols when we have a story before they do, which happens all the time, but we don’t go all “attack of the killer attorneys” on them).
Newspapers like to brag that they have more readers than ever when they combine their online readers. Here’s a thought, newspaper publishers: Check your internet log files and see how many of those page views come from links provided by bloggers. I think you’ll be surprised.
