Don't talk to me like I'm a child. There's stuff I don't completely understand (copyright law being one of them), but that doesn't make me simpleminded.

Short excerpt must be acknowledge as sourced from the article.

Uh, yeah. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

I know it seems stupid, but you understand this, Rachel, from your grad school days.

Clearly, I must be stupid because I don't understand what AP wants here. Are they saying that a blogger can't link to something on the AP site without explicitly stating the info came from AP? That's one thing.

Or are they saying that, for example, Randy can't link to Atrios whos's linked to TPM who's linked to the NYTimes who got a story from AP without explicitly acknowledging AP as the original source?

Because, frankly, the latter would pretty much kill the internet.

Oops, sorry. I should never try to read stuff late at night after more than one glass of wine.

You know the stories I am talking about. These past 10 months have been nothing if not interesting to see how a story that was written by a local reporter moves first to the blogs then is picked up town by town via the AP. Yes, I fully believe at least two of our local stories would never have been printed in the dailies from Nashville to San Diego if not for the blogs local to those towns first covering it.

The stories the AP really seems to be protecting are their own original content and not the stories they have picked up from the multitude of dailies, correct?