I wanted to include this story about Deceiver scooping the NY Times and ABC (among others) on certain aspects of the John Edwards story, only to have the MSM pirate their info as “research” without ever offering credit. It just didn’t fit within the context of the piece.

It’s a two way street, and I think both myself and Choire Sicha touch on that fact. I don’t think it can be disputed, however, that the majority of fair-use and copyright violations in the strict, legal sense occur with the blogosphere capitalizing on work already done by traditional print journalists. If you credit the source and offer your own, original thought as the bulk of the piece, then I definitely see no problem and agree that it is a positive form of idea & information exchange that could only be possible on the Net.

Also, smearing all blogs as not crediting their sources is lazy journalism on your page- there are many blogs that do actually credit their sources and link to them. To try to equate that with plagiarism is foolish. These blog posts drive Net traffic to the original articles and cite them as sources. How is that a bad thing?

I doubt whether blockquoting an entire article, linking to the source, and then adding “I agree” to the bottom of the post is plagiarism. But Sicha’s points–is it lazy? Is it fair use?–are important questions to ask, too.

Small nitpick: I think most keyboards read CTRL, not CNTL.