Blogging has become an established part of the online media in the last few years and the ease of getting online and publishing your thoughts and opinions or transmitting news has resulted in a huge rise in the number of bloggers worldwide. The fact that it is so quick and simple to publish articles on a personal blog has made the 'blogosphere' what it is today. It has also brought with it new challenges.A University of Washington report has said that since 2003, 64 bloggers have been arrested for publishing their views and that in 2007 three times more people were arrested than in 2006, mostly in China, Egypt and Iran. These are estimates and the actual numbers could be far higher. Numerous arrests have also been made in the UK and US.
According to the report, the bloggers had often exposed government corruption, human rights abuses and suppression of protests or were criticising government policies or politicians. The number of arrests is expected to rise again this year.
There has been legal action recently too. In the US, the Associated Press claimed that a social news site Drudge Retort infringed its copyright by quoting stories and demanded that these quotes be removed from the site, which they were.
The AP then received the wrath of bloggers worldwide for what they saw as an attack on blogging. Quoting from an article and linking to the original is common practice amongst bloggers. Legally, the fair use doctrine (fair dealing in the UK) allows a small amount of text to be quoted without permission without breaching copyright law.
The Associated Press has changed its position slightly since the original take down request and AP Vice President, Jim Kennedy told the New York Times that it regretted the "heavy handed" approach to Drudge Retort and that it would rethink its policy towards bloggers. It hasn't removed the take down demands, however.
It appears that the AP has a problem with other websites quoting any of its articles and conveying the news themselves and would prefer people to go directly to the source. AP now plans to develop (presumably restrictive) guidelines for blog linking and summarizing. It has not announced how or if it plans to enforce these guidelines on the hundreds of millions of mostly small time blogs throughout the world.
Whether companies like AP will have the ability to impact the proliferation of blogs that borrow quotes from other sources will be an interesting issue to keep an eye on. The other question on many people's lips is: what site doesn't want links leading users towards it? AP apparently.
