Rogers Cadenhead tells Threat Level on Monday he has taken down works from his Drudge Retort blog that The Associated Press has deemed an infringement of the nation's oldest and largest news news-gathering operation's copyrights.

The AP recently sent seven takedown notices to his social news site for the offense of reposting a few sentences or more and reprinting their headlines, sometimes linking those sentences and headlines to the full stories generated from the New York-based media concern. And Cadenhead, whose site fosters commentary on others' works, said he was unsure whether he would legally challenge the AP's notices.

He said he was "absolutely" worried he could set bad precedent if he went to court. Cadenhead notes that there is no "bright line" rule when it comes to defining actionable copyright infringement in the blogosphere – a statement backed by most copyright attorneys.

"If AP were to go after some small fish and get a ruling that running two sentences of stories was copyright infringement, that would have a chilling impact across the net," Cadenhead said. "The law lacks a bright line."

For its part, the AP is doing an about-face of sorts.

It realizes that if it followed the logic of its take-down notices with Cadenhead, a zillion other sites would also get take-down notices. Much of the blogosphere would likely be in violation – and a whack-a-mole litigation machine would follow.

But because of the Drudge Retort episode, the AP is formulating guidelines on how it would deal with intellectual property disputes with bloggers, with the end result treating blogging commentary sites different than non-human, news aggregation sites.

"We need to take a step back. It doesn't mean we're going to try to define a legal standard for fair use. All we're saying, we're going to figure out how the bloggers can use our content in a way we feel gives them a lot of leeway but still protects us," Jim Kennedy, an AP vice-president, told Threat Level in an interview.

Kennedy added: "Do we really want to take this fight into the blogosphere? I think the answer to that question is, 'no we don't.' Bloggers are different. That distinction was not being made. To that extent, this has been a helpful episode."

Here's what AP's Irene Keselman, the co-op's IP coordinator, told the Drudge Retort, according to Cadenhead: "The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of 'fair use.' AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights."

Intellectual property attorneys said the issue falls into murky legal terrain. Last year, Google agreed to a licensing deal with Agence France Presse, which claimed indexing its leads to the wire service's stories amounted to copyright infringement.

"If there was a court decision that said quoting from a news story without doing a lot of commentary was an infringement, then I think a lot of blogs would have to rethink there business model," said Nancy Mertzel, a New York intellectual property attorney with Thelen Reid.

Kathleen Williamson, a Tucson-based IP lawyer, offered advice to bloggers:

"If the blogger were my client, I would advise reading the news and then writing one’s own headlines and content just to avoid trouble."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a vast amount of blogging legal tools, with this warning: "There are no hard and fast rules for fair use (and anyone who tells you that a set number of words or percentage of a work is "fair" is talking about guidelines, not the law). The Copyright Act, the EFF says, sets out four factors when considering whether a work is fair use or a copyright violation.

Disclosure: I was a former AP legal affairs writer between 2000 and 2007.

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