Fragano, I think the Associated Press knows that that's what's going on, but I'm not sure Robert Cox knows it.

But nobody noticed.

(Full disclosure: I've been part of the Firedoglake community from near the beginning, so my view of the MBA may be a little biased. But not much. ;-)

What a load of tripe; there are thousands of blogs that you can subscribe to electronically, and this guy's saying it's taking him a YEAR to figure out how to do it?

For that matter, where's the list of members? Could it be the list is so pitifully small that he's embarrassed to show it? Zero is a pitifully small number too...

No, no. I'm sure there's at least one name on the membership list.

Possibly even two... :-)

When I use Google, I see the AP heading that you can use under the title of the various news articles.

As my wife has pointed out, AP articles tend to get carried by newspapers all over the nation; if someone linked and quoted excerpts from one of those, does that mean AP could demand the payment or cease and desist for them too?

Do I need to put a banner on my blog or something?

I need to feel important. It's really all I have. I want to make policy for everyone in spite of all those pesky established laws and stuff. Mostly, though...

I just want the AP to love me.

Okay, fine, so you (Robert Cox) won't mind standing down then? You'll tell the AP that a lot of bloggers would actually be pissed about the idea of you speaking for them?

CB@9: Haha...yes. Exactly.

But they are still idiots...and have been for a long time.

It seems that maybe the MBA helps bloggers defend their rights the way SFWA helps SF writers defend theirs: helping out the people who have asked them, to the detriment of everyone who hasn't.

Cry "Cheeble" and let loose....

==================

Hmm. A website claiming Authority, which seems to have nothing of any sort regarding material citing achievements and background of key personnel, no history/information about the inception and antecedents and whys and wherefores of the organization, no information about officers.... compare that to e.g. Making Light which on the front page includes,
"Making Light: a weblog by Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden and their many commenters and sometime guests. Because “a better future isn't going to happen by itself.” (Thank you, Kevin Maroney.) More below." with link to who Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden are, and some why/wherefore about Making Light.

Hmm, perhaps I should contemplate starting a site rating service, with such things as ratings for providing information about who is behind the site and why, how comprehensible such information is, how up to date the site is, if the links are working or not and how comprehensive and userfule they are compared to how comprehensive and useful the site says it is.... (That is, a site which says, "here are a few of my favorite links" that has a four or five links, the hype and the reality match assuming that the person actually likes the sites linked go (that involves an assumption which I accept as true unless demonstrated otherwise). A site which claims to list all SF publishers which include paranormal romance epublishers but not Baen, Tor, DAW, Ace, Eos, etc., gets a zero... a site which links to the epublishers and says it's linking to paranormal epublishers, however, is being accurate if/when it links to them). Etc.)

I will also be fascinated to hear details about the "hundreds of cases" he alleges to have assisted in. No, actually, he said "we." Royal? Inclusive? Imagined?

I pointed out to AP that the crux of the problem is that AP has never articulated what exactly it wants from bloggers.

Anybody who claims there's any possible way to represent the blogosphere is either just plain nuts or dishonest.

For example, check out this bit from Newsweek's in-house political blog.

Newsweek and the Media Bloggers Association (MBA) have launched "The Ruckus," a new group blog about politics for Newsweek.com. The blog will feature posts from nine MBA-member bloggers about the presidential campaign on a single page, giving Newsweek.com readers a convenient sampling of some of the best political blogging from across the country and from key primary states.

" 'The Ruckus' will be a key part of our 2008 campaign coverage," said Deidre Depke, editor of Newsweek.com. "We want to expose Newsweek readers to all the exciting discourse and discussion that is taking place on political blogs today. We think 'The Ruckus' will help introduce readers to a new array of voices and will encourage enlightened political discourse as the '08 race steps into high gear."

But we don't want Newsweek readers to go all crazy and actually read real political blogs; they can play dress-up over here with us instead.

The Media Bloggers Association is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of "blogging" or "citizen journalism" as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.

MBA Members support the freewheeling expression of ideas and strong personal opinions inherent to blogging but are equally committed to commonly accepted journalistic standards of fairness, accuracy, transparency and accountability in expressing those ideas and opinions.

I guess that's why all of the blog posts on The Ruckus are by "Anonymous."

It's also like a vanity press, where he provides an imprint of (dubious) credibility, for a fee. Members also get a feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded (as in similarly duped) souls. But I bet it's mostly about selling insurance. Follow the money. AP is not just using him. He's using them.

It has something to do with marbles, and how I saved them from extinction. Really, as a blogger, it's better if you just call rather than make me, you know, blog about it.

Some kid named Ryan Tate has a snarky little post about our efforts to help a blogger facing a legal threat over at Gawker. He claims to have tried to find out about the MBA by reading our site and searching the web. Here's a thought, kid. Pick up the phone and call us - our phone number and email is on the same site you claimed to have read.

Apparently their excerpting widget doesn't mind stopping in the middle of a word. Maybe that's all the letters their content license allows?

Of course he could have found by phone or email, but did not bother. How like one of those careless bloggers. . .

That glitch on his website (35) is typical -- he's terrible at doing maintenance on it. Half his entries have gibberish in place of quotation marks. At least one entry that's been up for a long time has "placeholder" as its entry text. Whenever his site indicates there are comments on an entry, the number of comments ranges from the hundreds to the tens of thousands, but I can't find a single comment in any of them.

Really, it's more a Potemkin weblog than the real thing. Technorati lists it as having a grand total of two inbound links.

Hugh (43), my favorite comment so far was posted in the Boing Boing comment thread of Cory's first entry on the subject:

#19 posted by Elfwreck, June 17, 2008 8:03 AM

Definitely time to write some AP/RIAA slashfic. With extensive use of AP quotes.

Really. He isn't going to be speaking for me so long as I can speak for myself. The service he claims to provide is as irrelevant as he is, and his true motive may, in fact, be to scam folks into buying an unnecessary form of insurance as TomB pointed out in comment #31 and as stated on the MBA Membership page:

"A major benefit of our requiring media law training for our members is that Media Pro Insurance, a leading provider of media liability coverage to newspapers, TV networks, film companies and others, was willing to create a special insurance program to offer our members a significant discount off this type of insurance, making it affordable for many bloggers who need this type of insurance..."

But wait! There's more! Act now and receive a free set of Bob Cox Endorsed Ginsu steak knives. They slice! They dice!

Really. The only interests these jokers seem to be serving are their own, and it's distressing that the AP would even approach this guy to speak on anyone's behalf.

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/06/17/hey-associated-press-you-owe-me-at-least-132125/

There I was, all ready to write some satiritic slash involving MPAA, RIAA, AP, Mchll Mlkin, Rsh Lmbgh, Eln Dnnlly, etc., and I discover that Mchll Mlkn is excoriating AP in this?! Yipes!

http://watchingolbermannwatch.blogspot.com/2007/02/robert-cox-attempting-to.html

I'll vouch for that.

Or not.

Yes, that comment is me.

Lila, #54: That's it! Cox is just providing corroborative detail, intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Let's trace the command-and-money flows around a little: the MBA is proclaimed to be an organization to supposedly represent bloggers who are employed by (old) media, many of which are the member/owners of AP. So this group will collect dues from and, in theory, be responsible to people who get their paychecks from media companies, who are the customers and members of the Associated Press, which this group will be negotiating with to supposedly determine the rights of those people. (Oh, and incidentally all the other bloggers, too. You know, the little people.)

Thus, should the MBA unexpectedly develop some kind of spine, the AP simply tells its organizations "tell them to stop that", the organizations tell their employees, "you cut that out", the employees tell the MBA "hey, what's with this independence stuff", and the MBA can quickly resume its proper subservient posture. Maybe they'll announce the concession that you can have up to 10 words for free!

What's particularly great is this: It sounds like he's tried to set it up as a traditional membership organization with board, etc., so Cox doesn't even have to be aware that this is how it works. If the media companies sign up enough of their house bloggers as members, he can preen and posture to his heart's content, and at his first sign of independence, the members can vote in a new board and kick him out the door. Of course, if this doesn't work, the AP still takes no damage; they just announce that they've realized the MBA does not really represent bloggers (the shock!) and goes shopping around for a fresh set of stooges.

I can admire its elegance, in a kind of twisty Machiavellian Pohl and Kornbluth way.

A general note: segment #3 is up. If you can't see it, empty your cache and reload.

Oh, gosh, where to begin. Jeff Jarvis, Lou Dobbs, Vaughn Ververs, someone from FAIR, Jim Brady, Andrew Heyward and some guy from the Economist are half of a panel which was almost all to the left politically?

He was going to balance all this liberal white guyness by offering them John Amato?

Vaughn Ververs, the editor of CBS News' politics blog, is a scarequotes "blogger"?

LaShawn Barber is quite capable of providing valuable insight on the emerging media landscape as an alternative to Jay Rosen?

The mind reels.

International Dispensary: Internets Official Titles

Membership in IDIOT is limited, act now!

Given the sudden profusion of esteemed positions and titles in this post I have created an umbrella organization designed to coordinate and represent these august persons as they post their way through the blogosphere:

International Dispensary: Internets Official Titles

Membership in IDIOT is limited, act now!

Do I get a sweet insurance deal?

I think you've inspired a new phrase:

"Robert Cox...yeah his cache is a few reloads short of being full"

Evidently you didn't read mine. The Media Bloggers Association became involved in this dispute because I asked them for help. I was told about them by Liza Sabater, a fellow liberal blogger who writes Culture Kitchen.

I wrote more about this today on my weblog.

You may now resume your ass-kicking.

"An historic agreement was reached today between the Sham Beer Drinkers' Organization and the Madeup Brewers and Bottlers Association...."

Rogers Cadenhead @67: Evidently you didn't read mine.
I just did a Google on +AP +"Media Bloggers Association" and gave up after scrolling through the first four pages of results. I'm sorry, but I hardly think anyone can be blamed for overlooking your post.

You may now resume your ass-kicking.
I'm not sure your implication that there's been any kind of interlude here is accurate :)

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Who are you and why should I care? Why should I be interested in reading your website content as opposed to any of the many millions of others available?

As for why I'm one of the habitues of Making Light, some of the factors involve having known Teresa and Patrick for three decades or so, in person, long before weblogs existed.... They know who I am reflexively the same way.

I don't know you, however, and why should I view you as a credible source?

I'm the guy at the center of this dispute, Lance! Teresa can dig into the Wayback Machine and the Wikipedia edit log to find dirt on Robert but she can't find my blog? I'm pulling her credentials.

With his head tucked
Up into his ass
He posts on Making Light
With his head tucked
Up into his ass
Can't see daylight!

With his head tucked up into his ass
With his head tucked up into his ass!

Why would I trust as a representative of bloggers somebody who has demonstrated so little attention to his own blogging that he hasn't bothered to learn how to avoid screwing up the character encodings on his entries in new and innovative ways?

(For the technically minded: he has apparently created the document in UTF-8, uploaded it as if it were ISO-8859-1, and his server has then converted the meaningless ISO-8859-1 to equally meaningless UTF-8 for presentation to readers. Clever.)

Furthermore, while you certainly are an involved party to the inciting incident, Teresa's intent (from my perspective) is to either confirm or debunk Roger's implicit/explicit claims that MBA represents even a single blog that could possibly be considered popular by any measurement much less a substantial number of those. In either case, the assumption that your blog is a crucial component of this research whose absence is inexcusable just does not wash.

Now, if you'd come on here and simply said something to the effect of "Hi, I'm Rogers, the guy at the middle of all this - here's my posts about the mess" I think you would have gotten a lot of more positive attention.

If I hadn't asked, and I hadn't told every reporter who calls me to also call the Media Bloggers Association, we probably aren't having this discussion at all about the MBA.

You can find more about how the MBA got involved on my weblog:

http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3370

As Oliver Willis just wrote on his own blog, I'm not clear on why we have to kick the MBA's ass every time they intervene in a blogger's legal difficulties. Who else is volunteering for that job?

Rogers seems to be perfectly legit; he linked his blog to his name where everybody can read it, and his tone seems perfectly mild to me given that he's personally invested in what's going on.

Love, C.

That's not about your case; that's about all of the future cases the AP is planning to create. Robert Cox, on his blog, talks about the need for a set of guidelines; he's working with the AP to create those guidelines. That's why he's become a target, not because he helped you with your case. He's actively involved in helping the AP in their attempt to limit the rights of bloggers, and he's allowing the AP to talk about the MBA as "a bloggers group," which implies that it's an advocacy organization, when really it's a professional association with limited membership, controlled by Robert Cox.

Making Light has more main posts in any reasonably active two-month period than this guy put up in the entire two-year history of his blog.

I noticed the same thing that Teresa did about the comments -- huge numbers of comments, but impossible to read them. I bet that if we ever do get to read them that they'll be endless inducements to click through for Cheap Viagra, On-Line Poker, and Hot Gay Teens.

Anything's possible, but I don't believe that to be the case. When Cox's group helps a blogger reach a settlement in a legal dispute, one of their conditions is that there are terms they won't agree to. For instance, they won't settle a blog libel suit by removing something from the web that's true.

Oliver can say more on this since he's a founding member, but the MBA isn't a newly concocted group providing cover to narrow blogger's rights. They've been involved in this for a while, and their creation was motivated by Cox's own experience getting sued. They get 5-10 calls a week from bloggers in legal trouble. I've heard from people at the EFF who vouch for their work.

Ah. I didn't realize that--it was not clear from his post here.

Note in general: yes, if one wants to get that sort of point across, one ought to specify in sufficient detail and emphasis and clarity, "here is my point and why."

His post at #67 read,

"I've been monitoring reactions to the AP story. I haven't seen a single weblog indicate that it had heard of the Media Bloggers Association before this story broke."

Evidently you didn't read mine. The Media Bloggers Association became involved in this dispute because I asked them for help. I was told about them by Liza Sabater, a fellow liberal blogger who writes Culture Kitchen.

I wrote more about this today on my weblog.

You may now resume your ass-kicking.

To break down my reactions:

"I've been monitoring reactions to the AP story. I haven't seen a single weblog indicate that it had heard of the Media Bloggers Association before this story broke."

This paragraph is a straight quote from Teresa at the start of this thread. Okay, this is setting context.

Evidently you didn't read mine.

This is a combatative statement, or rather, comes off as pugnacious, putting the responsibility on the reader to have a clue in a bucket about "who is this poster, why should I be reading the poster's blog? There is nothing so far putting the poster involved in anything in the thread as a participant, and the poster's name has no connection to anything for me--as opposed to if Fragano posted, or Serge, or CHip, or Bill Higgins, or xopher, etc.

The Media Bloggers Association became involved in this dispute because I asked them for help.

Askedthem for help for what? I missed I admit the "this dispute"--it's a prepositional phrase, which usually are not main constituents and main points of a sentence, which is in between a non-direct verb form ("became involved") and and a subordinate clause--and not only that, "became" and "because" kinaeshetically in print, are VERY much similar-looking, the visual differice is that one has "m" where the other has "au", the two words visually otherwise are identically, and aurally, they are also start the same with the same unaccented first syllable followed by a
"k" sound and only get differentiated audibly with ame versus ause.

So, I missed the "in this dispute" and instead it registers in my mind as "in a dispute."

The subordinate clause, because I asked them for didn't say anything why the poster asked the organization for help, however, why is the topic of the next sentence, which is in a new paragraph. And once again, I had missed the "
this" in "in this dispute." There wasn't any more information about the dispute in the post, to get background or reiterating/reinforcing information.

I was told about them by Liza Sabater, a fellow liberal blogger who writes Culture Kitchen.

The sentence above is in passive voice, and puts Liza Sabater and that she is a liberal blogger with some blog that there is no other information about, as the key information in the sentence. There's nothing about why anyone should regard Liza Sabater as any sort of authority on anything, no information about her blog other than the poster claims that it's a liberal blog and that the poster is a liberal blogger....

I wrote more about this today on my weblog.

Again, what I got from this sentence wasn't useful information, since there's no information about what the dispute is other than that "this" that I missed.... an additional sentence saying SOMETHING specific/denotative about the content of the blog would have helped a lot and provided a different stimulus than the eliciting the post DID get from me.

You may now resume your ass-kicking.

This is a definite pugnacious challenge... and this is not a forum full of passive viewers sitting in an audience expecting to get hired hand entertainment for a financial entry free... wrong part of the psychosphere for that (there is a very long-standing conversation in science fiction convention running fandom about people who go to events to pay their money and be entertained, versus conventions when people pay for memberships and -engage- with other people.... Making Light comes, my perception is, from the engagement tradition. Saying "resume you ass-kicking" in this form has the connotation of just having INVITED people like me to go into attack mode in response.

The next post #72 had
I'm the guy at the center of this dispute, Lance! Teresa can dig into the Wayback Machine and the Wikipedia edit log to find dirt on Robert but she can't find my blog? I'm pulling her credentials.

There was no information about what "this dispute" was other than the words "this dispute," and again, I was NOT reading something that said the "this dispute" was the AP issue!!! So, when the next two sentences looked like an attack against Teresa, her level of clue, and her ability to research, THAT was was elicited the response from me....

Oh, yeah. No comments. None. No "Leave a Comment" link. No "View Comments" links. Nothing, nada and, in fact, zip.

Perhaps (just perhaps) Mr. Cox is missing the point on this whole "blog" thing? You know, the feedback, the dialogue, the stuff that makes Making Light (and many other blogs) so great?

There was also a little dustup where Cox apparently represented himself to the NY Times as having 'negotiated access' for all the bloggers, following which the Times had to print a correction that he only got access for his own group.

You win, and please pass the brain bleach.

If bloggers choose to negotiate away their rights, they certainly may. I'm not completely comfortable with a private entity which doesn't represent non-members taking it on themselves to do it.

Paula @ 86

Liza Sabater is a fairly well-known liberal blogger in New York. She gets linked to by the local media a lot. Someone from our market would probably assume everyone would recognize the name.

"He called the Enterprise a garbage scow!"

"And that's when [you hit the Klingon, starting the fight?]"

"Aye, Captain."

It was the attack on Teresa that got to me.

Now, once they had agreed to meet to see if we could resolve Rogers situation, we offered to provide any assistance we could in helping them draft some sort of guidelines that could be promulgated to the blogosphere so that bloggers would have a clear understanding of AP's point of view on copyright, excerpting and linking. They were receptive to that offer and so when we meet this week to get Rogers case resolved (hopefully) we will stick around and try to kick around ideas on what a set of guidelines would look like.

He is using your case to create an opportunity for his association to "provide assistance" to the AP, in getting their point of view on copyright promulgated to the blogosphere.

That seems like a serious conflict of interest to me. When he's done with the part of the meeting that's about representing you, whose interests will he be representing?

I can't tell you how glad I am to have joined the WorldCon committees to vote on Hugos and start inching back into science fiction fandom.

But I digress.

That's an assumption that didn't fly in my case... there have been world experts I've known whose names are not known outside their areas of expertise. Assuming that someone is a Media Personality to the universe tends to be a bad assumption.

The most that can be assumed about someone posting on Making Light, is that the person is posting on Making Light, probably has a computer or at least has computer access, and probably has enough web literacy to have posted it themself (given some of the spam that shows up, it's not clear that even that much is true....).

People/handles gain or lose credibility points according to content and content over time. Someone known to some fraction of the habitues who posts with a recognizable name/handle/referential content, has baggage coming in, based on past history that generally is outside of Making Light.

There are a number of different venues possible for that--science fiction conventions, publishing, fanzines, music connections, weblogs, knitting connections, etc. Assuming that someone from one sphere is known to people with tie-ins from other spheres, again, is a bad assumption... while one might be six people from just about anyone on the planet, that doesn't mean that person A two degrees away from Person B, has a clue in a galaxy about person B.... there are LOTS of links that remain never explored, sometimes I get surprised even with the SF universe, that A and B have never met, when they're both people I've been acquainted with for years....

There are other organizations* that help bloggers.

They tend to take cases with constitutional implications, and they are limited in how many they can take.

However, that is orthogonal to the question of how the MBA represents itself / is represented in the media.

There's a big difference if the AP knows it's dealing with and working out the situation with (or dictating their modified terms to) one specific blogger and his representative, vs. the AP dealing with and working out the 21st century implications of the already complex area of fair use.
_____________
* They mention their blogger-specific work on journalist rights, free speech rights, political speech rights, right to anonymity, and freedom from liability in hosting speech. They specifically list Eli Lilly Zyprexa Litigation; Deihl v. Crook, Spocko and KSFO, Apple v. Does; Barrett v. Rosenthal; OPG v. Diebold and Doe Anonymity Cases.

And as for social skills, there was the occasion at a Boskone after I'd said to someone "your social skills are even worse than mine" that mentioning the incident to a prominent member of the Making Light community (if the person remembers and wants to self-identify, the reason I'm not is that I leave it up to the person if the person notices and remembers) deflated me by saying, "No, [name of person] is not more socially clueless than you, [name of person] is intentionally nasty, not socially clueless."

However... it looks like you're trying to challenge for lack of social clue, or perhaps merely being gratuitously nasty, or some combination of both.

Everybody, Rogers Cadenhead is the guy who does Drudge Retort. I don't know what he's like in normal circumstances, because I've never been in the habit of reading his blog. At the moment, he's at Ground Zero in this fight. I've been there. One becomes excitable and grumpy and prone to miss things. Please do your best to be nice to him.

Rogers is at the center of this issue, asked the MBA for help, then when he makes a comment here, you start asking him who the heck he is. Sheesh.

Ah.
(Does conversion, equating Rogers Cadenhead to being ground zero with AP using him as target on a "gone nuclear" option to make an example of.)

Yes, I can now see that he might be a tad discombobulated/upset/etc. (understatement)

I will attempt to disengage from any further provocation etc. towards him, or skirmishings at him.

(Actually, I have heard quite a number of positive things about the Drudge Report over time... as noted above, though, association of people's names with various stuff, often don't associate easily for me. There was a couple whom I knew both of, and it wasn't until they'd split up, that I realized that they had been married! I knew than each of them had gotten married, but not that it had been to one another! (I WROTE that socially I'm clueless, it's not my fault if people don't believe what I say/write regarding that!)

Did you mistype that? I'd expect you to know what the Drudge Report is.

I do sympathise with your protective feelings toward Teresa. I feel similarly protective--foolishly, of course, given that she always comes to battle whistling a cheery tune and juggling handfuls of ammunition.

A lot of talk from Cadenhead about the MBA's important work providing legal aid to bloggers. Impressive, if it's true. Let's head over to their news section and read all about the great stuff they do.

The first page of stories on their news page is mostly stuff on this recent kerfuffle. By page 2 the posts are a year old, and mostly consist of links to relevant opinion pieces, or articles with soundbites from Robert Cox.

This one, for example, sounds all exciting with its mention of Bloggers! Getting! Sued!, but the actual article only talks about...well...that one time Robert Cox got sued.

This one sounds like it might actually be something but the link is to...the post itself.

Around April 2007 there are posts relating to a blogger named Katherine Coble. The situation seems to have been that she and her husband discovered a scam employment agency, she blogged about it, and they threatened to sue. (The MBA posts link to long-404'd news articles.) Seems like they settled out of court. To do: ask Katherine Coble about the MBA.

In between, it seems like Robert Cox may have made some kind of statement about the Kathy Sierra debacle -- was that around then, or was it about the Kos pie fight, or something else? -- but the linked article is dead.

Then, page 4-ish (early 2007), there's a lot of stuff about the Libby Trial. More patient people than I will have to watch the Youtube video in the post about MBA's deal with the AP.

This post links to a promising story about a Republican lobbyist blogger getting a restraining order against an online anti-fan, but it doesn't seem that the MBA was actually connected to the case.

Iiiiiiinteresting: this late 2006 post links to an AP story that is, like so many of these things, basically a MBA press release dressed up like a serious article.

Ummm...and that's the end of it, in 2006.

In summary, it looks like the MBA is a vehicle for getting Robert Cox quoted in papers. And they've been awfully cozy with the AP for a long while (well, two years is a long while in Internet time).

We don't all read Drudge, even if we've heard of it. We certainly don't know the names of all the other bloggers out there, and probably not the names of their blogs either.
In fact, I haven't seen any names attached to this story before this post.
Cut us a little slack, too, please?

The percentage of funding for the evanglizing activities was quite a bit larger than the funding for humanitarian aid for food and assisting getting people shelter. The SBC websites were also being self-congratulatory about e.g. having proselytized at least one Roman Catholic victimized on 9/11 and converted the Roman Catholic into a Southern Baptist....

"Oh, and Rogers? If I were you, I'd ask the EFF for help. Your case is exactly the kind of thing they're there for."

Since the dispute made the Times, I've had the EFF and other big groups contact me regarding potential future courtship. I'm hoping that it won't come to that.

Basically: the MBA doesn't seem to have done sh*t for bloggers; they seem to have actually represented two people in the past two years, one of them being Roger Cadenhead. And they covered the Libby trial. And Robert Cox spends a lot of time telling reporters his opinion on blogging, because he's so official and such.

Does anyone know of anything else they've done?

I misread Retort as Report.

It's a shame they didn't start up a year earlier. They probably could have handled hand-picked founding member Donald Luskin's attempt to sue Atrios out of his anonymity without his having to lawyer up.

OK, I'm not an American. I maybe don't quite get where the cultural standards are. Bur it doesn't feel quite straight rto me. There is, in what I read, a sense of lurking dishonesty.

Take this page as an instance

The hadline is "Bloggers seek training to avoid legal pitfalls", but what's obviously presented is a quote from the MBA. It doesn't summarise the story behind the headline, which turned out to be the headline of a story on a site called redOrbit

And when you read that story, it's more about an organisation offering training than about anyone actually seeking it. The story is almost an advert, which happens to quote Robert Cox. And the Robert Cox quote is "told the Associated Press"

Nothing wrong with that, though the only source for the stories of nervous bloggers seems to be the Associated Press. And that starts to look a bit less honest.

OK, stipulated, the sort of limits on what you can safely say, traditionally taught to journalists, need to be more widely known.

The examples given seem good: bloggers who are getting into risky territory.

But right now AP have the image as one of the hazards, and the claims about the risk, even Robert Cox's enumeration of the scale of the problem--more than 100 cases and $17million total judgements, have come through AP.

Conflict of interests?

Anyway, I get a strong whiff of self-aggrandisement in the story as Robert Cox presents it. I also get the feel that he's not really reading the original. It's not bloggers asking for training--one of them hasn't done anything with a domain name for eight years--it's an offer of training, backed by a lot of scare stories.

This doesn't encourage me to trust Robert Cox's view of what AP is doing. I wonder if he's really going to be much help as a representative of bloggers, as a class.

OK, he's Rogers Cadenhead's representative. He's not mine. I doubt he's Teresa's. And, to be fair, AP only describe him as President of a blogger's organisation.

But he and they are both talking as though he's important, and as if he knowa what he's talking about, and I fear we'll be stuck with whatever he agrees to.

I fear that because I don't see signs of competence, and I don't think he has the importance he claims. He doesn't need to be able to write a sonnet, deliver a baby, or plan an invasion. (We have high standards hereabouts.) But I'd like to see signs that he can recognise bullshit when he sees it.

Hint: it's the brown patty in the grass with the circling flies.

No, we won't. Whatever Bob Cox agrees to with the AP is only binding on Bob Cox.

Big operations sometimes have specific criteria for picking targets--note that Apple when it went around suing other companies for alleged copyright/patent infringement, usually went after small fry that couldn't afford the time and energy and funds for a war in court, and left e.g. Hewlett-Packard (which had licensing for graphical user interface intellectual property from Xerox) completely alone. That is, the specific criteria include looking for small fry who don't have the wherewithal to fight back, for whom the path of least pain and effort is to fold/accede. ASCAP and/or BMI have the habit of showing up in a locality and e.g. picking three businesses to make examples out of, there might be 300 businesses in the locality and all of them playing music without paying ASCAP/BMI fees, but the hammer hits the three that got picked for hammering.... The other 297 might never get checked/raided, the situation is that those three are being made examples of "this is what can happen and sometimes does happen, and we are enforcing the intellectual property rights."

In the case of ASCAP/BMI it used to be that most of the commercially released music was under agreement/licensing with them.... I think that perhaps licensing of music etc. is in a state of mutation with webcasting and such and the ability to do direct downloads and pay for the specific material downloaded, as opposed to blanket licensing that pays the likes of Michael Jackson according to the portfolio of music he owns/has control of, and not according to the actual playing of material, however....

Getting back to what I think was my point (who, me wander around beating bushes and getting distracted? Snort....), big operations pick their targets and go after the ones they feel are least able/likely to effectively fight back. This ranges from insurance companies resistant to paying claims, to Apple suing small fry, to "patent troll" operations which buy up patents and then go around looking for people to sue/intimidate into paying them money to Go Away. Perhaps AP hired some patent troll lawyers...

(Note: the longest contemporary intellectual property war I'm aware of was Texas Instruments versus Japan Inc, it took TI thirty years and a large fortune working the patent infringement case up the court system in Japan, whereupon the top of the Japanese court system said that the patents were valid (they were basic microcuitry patents, which had long since expired in the rest of the world) and that the Japanese electronics industry owed TI 30 years' worth of royalty payments plus damages etc. TI is probably still collecting hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but it took TI probably at least a hundred million, and once again 30 years, pursuing the case in the Japanese court system. The companies that TI took to court en masse, probably figured that TI would drop the case, that the expense and time and energy that TI would have to involve, would cause TI to give up... TI however did have the funds and the persistence the resources otherwise to go forward with the lawsuit, for thirty years and ultimately won both the case, and lots more money that it had spent on the lawsuit... small fry though don't have those sorts of resources to expend and wait 30 years to get a return on, no matter how lucrative--there are lots of cases of companies which won the lawsuit but went bankrupt in the process....)

Does anyone know of anything else they've done?

But... but... They get five to ten calls a week from bloggers in some sort of legal distress.

Am I wrong for doubting the credibility of this story from Rogers' shilling here for MBA and Bob Cox right down to the notion that if it wasn't a scam operation, why is this thing cloaked in all sorts of bungled links, confusing and inaccessible comments, insurance sales pitches, legal advice pitches, special blogger training pitches, and so on and so forth?

Give me one reason why I should trust Bob Cox and believe his, as yet, unsupported claims that he's actually helped anyone.

Perhaps (just perhaps) Mr. Cox is missing the point on this whole "blog" thing? You know, the feedback, the dialogue, the stuff that makes Making Light (and many other blogs) so great?

With respect, Wirelizard, while I agree that dialogue and feedback are great -- at least on well-moderated weblogs -- they're hardly the only stuff that makes weblogs great, and there are good weblogs that do without them entirely, and others where the feedback is an infinitesimal part of the weblog's value.

Shades of gray, shades of gray
Words have meanings gone astray;
Shades of gray, shades of gray,
Crossing thought streams diff'rent weigh.

Shades of gray, shades of gray
In the weblogs corporate play
Shades of gray, shades of gray
Opinions corporate lawsuits sway

Shades of gray shades of gray
Arguments break out and stay
Shades of gray, shades of gray,
Communications gone astray.

And even then, only on certain indeterminate values of Bob Cox ranging over all possible configurations of Bob Cox.

Bob Cox

PS, yep it's really me, the all-powerful Robert Cox President of the Blogosphere.

I look suspiciously French all of a sudden.

You're not Robert Cox. I am Robert Cox. I'm the one who founded the Media Bloggers Association.

Bob Cox

PS I'm not that terrible a person.

The next "I'm gonna save you all, whether you want me to or not" bozo will probably have the initials CD.

Either that or he'll be the square root of the sum of the squares of Andrew Burt and Bob Cox, but that's too horrible to contemplate.

I wonder, then, if it would be appropriate to quiz him on the contents of this entry since he doesn't have comments there.

Now, Dave what is that you want to know about "this entry"?

I am happy to answer any questions but I need to run to the bank and cash my check from Karl Rove.

AP and RIAA tie the knot. Or at least, are fit to be tied.

Paula: You've been spitting fire at semi-random people for several days now. Anything you want to share, or are you just having "routine life issues"? (Yes, it's that striking!)

I am happy to clear things up.

First, I am not a very nice person at all and whoever has been saying that will be banned from the blogosphere.

Second, if you are in a legal dispute with some person or company attempting to use the court as a club to suppress speech they don't like you probably don't want a nice guy helping you.

Let's see what else I can tell you. I am a crazed right-wing fascist monster who secretly plots to dupe unsuspecting progressives into fronting for my nefarious plans to co-opt the blogosphere, gain control and turn it over to Rupert Murdoch. I do this by spending many hours of my time working on First Amendment cases and otherwise helping bloggers who face legal threats. I run the world's stupidest web site which spends many wasted pixels obsessing about Keith Olbermann. I am a lousy writer, a worse web designer and a personal failure in all human relationships.

Any other questions?

1) What is your position on AP's actions and announced intentions in this incident, specifically in regards to the use of their content?

2) What is your general response to the growing backlash against the forthcoming meeting between the MBA and AP? Has your involvement been mis-interpreted?

3) Do you represent any widely known (ie high traffic) blogs? If so, which ones?

4) What does the MBA accomplish that the EFF does not? Wouldn't your energies be better applied in working through/with the EFF?

5) You have been criticized (by TNH and others) for your apparent lack of demonstrated experience in blogging as evidenced by your blog. What experiences are you drawing on in leading the MBA as representing the interests of bloggers?

I have more, but these cover the major points I think. I (and I'm sure others here) are interested in serious, thoughtful answers to these questions and will be happy to engage in an intelligent dialog should you choose to answer.

Well I finally had time to sit down and write up an account of the AP-DR matter. It's not nearly as exciting as reading the news and blog accounts so let me apologize in advance for that.

http://tnyrl.cm/636c7

I will stop by later after I tip the scales in the net neutrality debate.

Have you made it clear to the AP that you speak only for yourself?

Tlonista (106): Thank you! Going through the MBA news archive was on my "things to do" list for this lengthening post, but I wasn't looking forward to it. From what I've already read, there and elsewhere, I'll agree that with your conclusion that the MBA appears to be a vehicle for getting Robert Cox quoted in papers, and that the organization has been cozy with the AP for some time now. If I had to guess at his long-term ambition, it would be to make himself and/or the MBA (I don't think they're distinguishable) the gatekeeper for blogger access and accreditation, because then he'd get to be important all the time. There may also be some notion of making money via membership fees and commissions on classroom fees. I don't rule out the possibility that some other person or organization is using him as a stalking horse.

The "feminist bloggergate" thing wasn't Cathy Sierra; it was Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan quitting the John Edwards campaign after they got a hard trashing by the right: a nasty episode.

Paula (108), proselytizing while giving aid is an old phenomenon. Sometimes it's done with naive but genuinely good intentions.

Fragano (109), I'm sorry to hear that. Even if there aren't tangible real-world repercussions, a bad online fight can leave participants with a real case of PTSD. It's one of the reasons I'm militant about setting limits on online behavior.

Rogers (110): Gafiated? Greetings, long-lost kin. Sorry about the roughing-up. Also about not reading your blog; but I've got this new job that keeps me improbably busy.

I also hope things don't get to the point where you need the EFF; but if that should happen, they've got some excellently knowledgeable people working with them.

Dave Bell, at the moment I can't speak to those issues. I just wish I could.

Dave Klecha (128): how amazing! I've been saying the very same thing.

Elfwreck: Thank you! And congratulations, you're now a Particle.

Robert Cox and Robert Cox: How come neither of you are saying the same things as the Robert Cox who's been sending me e-mail? For all I know, none of you are real!

I am a crazed right-wing fascist monster who secretly plots to dupe unsuspecting progressives into fronting for my nefarious plans to co-opt the blogosphere, gain control and turn it over to Rupert Murdoch.

Whoever it was that posted the URL: please don't spam the comment thread. We don't appreciate it, and bad things happen to the text.

This would be one of those times.

Which law firm?

That's ... well, the longer it sits there in that tab, the creepier it seems to me. Kind of a "watch what you say" vibe.

I don't understand how the AP sending a DMCA takedown notice to the Drudge Retort for, among other things, a post quoting 18 words from an AP story, and the AP offering the iCopyright service which claims to allow users to buy the web use rights for quotations of similar length, are unrelated issues. Sure, the AP maybe hasn't drawn the connection explicitly, but the implicit connection is there. If they don't intend iCopyright to apply to bloggers, they should bloody well say so, and they should drop the DMCA takedown notices against Mr. Cadenhead.

Mr. Cadenhead, if it were me, I'd go to the EFF now, before Mr. Cox makes a mess of your good name. Mr. Cox claims to have 14 anonymous cases settled by an anonymous "large law firm"; the EFF has many cases won publically. I know who I'd want at my back when I went up against a company much larger than me. You've got what seems on the face of it like a very reasonable fair use case on your hands, which should be eminently winnable if it goes to a court. I wouldn't let Mr. Cox settle for anything less than the AP dropping all charges against you. (I am not a lawyer; I can neither practice nor preside; your mileage may vary; warranty void where prohibited by law.)

If Mr. Cox's intentions are truly honorable, he really needs to get his own act together before trying to help others out. Fixing the links on his own site should be a higher priority than slagging off other bloggers on his blog for saying mean things about him.

I might be willing to accept the notion that folks here would be interested in "an intelligent dialog" on this post/thread except that I've READ this post/thread and can see quite clearly that there is no indication of this.

But I won't address that to you Lance and will be happy to answer your questions.

1) What is your position on AP's actions and announced intentions in this incident, specifically in regards to the use of their content?
Most folks think that this all started a few days ago when, in fact, it began two months ago. Back then AP found numerous instances where DR posters had copied and pasted the whole text of entire articles, verbatim, with the identical headline as the AP story and without any comment, analysis or other "transformative" change. In other words, the DR posters were clearly violating AP copyright. No one involved in this case disputes that including Rogers Cadenhead and the MBA's lawyer, Ron Coleman who is a specialist in Internet IP issues. Up until that point, AP was on solid ground. For some reason last week they (IMHO) over-reached and identified 10 new instances alleged infringement only one of which might stand a chance in court. At that point Rogers contacted the MBA through an MBA member who we had previously helped in an image copyright case.
I am not sure precisely which "announced" intentions you are referencing but I can tell you as someone who has been working with AP on this since before anyone here and heard anything about this case that the vast majority of reporting is way off base. I tried to address that in my most recent post which I linked elsewhere. Give me a specific statement by AP and I will answer.
2) What is your general response to the growing backlash against the forthcoming meeting between the MBA and AP? Has your involvement been mis-interpreted?
Doesn't it seem absolutely idiotic to anyone here that anyone in their right mind would have the chutzpah to claim they speak for the blogosphere? So, why then would you believe it just because you read it somewhere? I also addressed this in my recent post. I know the people at AP and when Rogers asked for help we did two things - offered to get him a legal counsel and to make direct contact with AP (this is our typical approach since we always try to mediate disputes if we can). That's how I ended up on the phone with Jim Kennedy last week. My purpose was two fold - to get him to agree to STOP any further legal action against DR (he informed me they had already come to that decision) and to set up a meeting before the expiration of the DMCA counter-claim period (6/20) to talk about the take down notices sent to Rogers earlier that week.
Once that was established I expressed my view that the AP really ought to explain themselves better because bloggers like Rogers were not wholesale infringers trying to steal from AP. The vast, vast majority of bloggers are people who want to get it right and that AP might do well to simple SAY what it is they wanted to see happen in the blogosphere rather than send hardly worded letters. Jim agreed. We used the term "guidelines" in the call in the OPPOSITE way that they've been conveyed, initially by the NYT. What I was talking about was, in effect, placing clear LIMITS on how far AP would go in enforcing their copyright, not the other way around.
3) Do you represent any widely known (ie high traffic) blogs? If so, which ones?
We are an association so "represent" is not a word I would use. Members of the MBA include lots of folks including some that people here may know: Jay Rosen, John Amato, Glenn Reynolds, Oliver Willis, Gabe Rivera, Ed Cone, Dan Gillmor, James Joyner, Rebecca MacKinnon. and many others.
4) What does the MBA accomplish that the EFF does not? Wouldn't your energies be better applied in working through/with the EFF?
Our mission is different. We are a group of bloggers working to help other bloggers. The MBA was originally created in 2004 after the New York Times brought legal action against me. A few weeks later I was invited to BloggerCon II by Dan Gillmor to come talk about that experience. While mostly everyone there (Berkman Center/Harvard Law School) was very optimistic about blogging I had been sensitized to the down side of blogging - the legal risks - and I saw a need for bloggers to work together to shine a bright light on attempts by deep-pocketed litigants to suppress speech they did not like and beat them back. To that extend, the MBA was originally like a mutual defense pact...like NATO :-)
From a legal case perspective, the EFF takes very specific cases and tends to be more focused on cases that establish precedent, like the ACLU We are more like a legal aid society and will try to help in every case we can. I communicate from time to time with the EFF and when Rogers approached me last week for the first thing I did was reach out to Kurt Opsahl at EFF and David Ardia of the Citizen Media Defense Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center. I've also asked the EFF to help us in developing a course for bloggers on the basics of media law so they will know their rights and know what questions to ask when dealing with media law issues. We are developing a course with the Poynter Institute's News University with help from quite a few First Amendment groups including EFF (I am about to ask them for MORE help but don't tell them that :-)
5) You have been criticized (by TNH and others) for your apparent lack of demonstrated experience in blogging as evidenced by your blog. What experiences are you drawing on in leading the MBA as representing the interests of bloggers?
I was first exposed to blogging by a true genius, Dan Bricklin, at Comdex in 2000. At that time I was working for a start-up in the image licensing business and I licensed a ton of content to Dan's website building company. It was Dan who introduced me to the blogging world through which I came to read, know or email with some early bloggers like Dave Winer and Evan Williams of Pyra Labs. Quite frankly I did not "get" blogging at the time and when Dan pitched me and others on helping Evan pay his bills by tossing him some money I very foolishly declined. I think the folks who did give him money made out OK later ;-)
At some point in 2002 I had this sudden realization that blogging was actually very cool and I started up some blogs using Evan's software. The sucked so after a while I would delete them and start another. I sort found my stride with The National Debate blog where I wrote about politics and political media and shows on cable news like Hardballl. After a few years of that I got bored pontificating about the media and discontinued it but not before starting up the world's stupidest web site about one of the shows I used to "cover" that was about the lowest rated show on cable (behind John McEnroe). You know him as Keith Olbermann. The site started as a complete goof but so many people from the far right and far left took it so seriously that I just keep it running. Now that Keith is a big star that site actually gets over 100,000 unique a month. I jump in and out of being active on that site mainly to screw around and stir up controversy.
After winding up The National Debate I created the Words in Edgewise blog to focus more on citizen media issues. The KO site was for laughs and the WiE site was for serious stuff related to MBA and First Amendment work. Unfortunately, the WiE site is always the first to get ignored when I get busy and I am often busy. I also twitter on my iphone, for what its worth.
This goes to another point, the MBA site. Yep, it sucks. Work gets done on a volunteer basis and my volunteer web guy bailed on my in the middle of moving to the new version of Drupal last fall. I have no clue how to run a drupal site and I've not found someone willing to pitch in help finish what the guy started. On top of that, I've been spending most of my free time traveling to conferences and meeting with various people that can help the MBA with two major area of concern - legal defense for bloggers and blogger access. I might add that I pay for everything out of my own pocket and I am not rich so when I travel I pay my own way. I can't afford to hire a web developer. As I guess some folks learned, I have worked with a variety of "credentialing authorities" to help bloggers get credentialed as media to things like the Scooter Libby Trial, a Democratic presidential debate, a GOP debate, corporate shareholder meetings, LPGA golf tournaments and many others. Our most recent effort was managing blogger credentialing for the NAA and AP at the NAA conference in DC where Obama, Hillary and McCain all spoke.
What will probably happen is once we complete the online training course, the insurance portal and the new membership process is online I will get to blog more.
I will add one more thing that you did not ask. Those folks here who think we do not need media liability insurance are talking out of their hat. The Citizen Media Defense Project currently has over 500 cases in in their case tracking database. We've been involved in over 400 cases over the past 4 years. The number of cases is doubling every year and the amount of JUDGEMENTS against bloggers is approach $20mm. There are two cases right now against bloggers that are in court for over $10mm each. For those who don't know judgements are when a case goes to trial and someone loses. Few cases ever go to court so hundreds of CASES FILED means thousands and thousands of THREATS. Case in point, AP v. Drudge Retort is not a filed case. It is a DMCA Take Down so unless someone counter claims there is not case filed and certainly no judgement.

Any other questions?

...

Robert Cox, if that really is you: You've asked whether there are any more questions. I can think of lots of them. For starters, have you ever been active on Wikipedia under the name Robertissimo?

"I can't tell you how glad I am to have joined the WorldCon committees to vote on Hugos and start inching back into science fiction fandom."

I don't quite understand this. I've been a member of maybe 25 WorldCons, since c. 1960, and have never come across the idea that it's necessary (as your phrasing seems to imply) to be on any kind of committee in order to vote on the Hugos.

Good luck on your struggle with the AP, though it sounds to me as though your choice of a Champion may have been less than wise.

It really is me. Check your IP logs. I am on Optonline in New Rochelle, NY which is the world headquarters of my evil empire. If you like I can take control of your computer screen and type secret messages on to your screen while you sleep.

I have never been active on Wikipedia in anything other than my own name. While I respect anoni-blogging I try to always post under my own name online (as you can see I have loads of breadcrumbs to follow). I never heard of Robertissimo.

I have, however, been critical of Wikipedia going back to the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference where I took Dave Winer's side in the "great podcast debate of '05 over who would get credit, Dave or Adam Curry. I was in the room at Stanford Law School when Dave and Adam debuted that thing they called "podcasting". That's where I first met Jimmy Wales. I've debated Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia on PBS.org, attended his Wikimania conference at Cambridge, MA, and recently appeared at Middle State Tennessee University with Jimmy, Al Gore and John Seigenthaler of the First Amendment Center in Nashville. I've also had the privilege of carrying Jimbo's luggage. I know you will hate it but Al Gore actually introduced me at the event and we got our picture taken together but he was unable to convince me that I need to walk home from Murfreesboro to New York to reduce my carbon footprint.

When John Seigenthaler was po'd with Wikipedia when his bio entry was vandalized - someone wrote that he was involved in the assassination of JFK (John was close to the Kennedys, he was a pall bearer at RFK's funeral) - John asked me to review the op-ed he wrote for USA Today slamming Wikipedia. I took John's side and slammed Jimmy too but Jimmy's cool and not easily ruffled ever since he got that cool picture of himself with Bono.

What else?

Have you made it clear to the AP that you speak only for yourself?

I don't speak "for myself". I also do not speak for the members of the MBA as individuals except in any specific case where they have specifically empowered me to do so such as putting together a group blog for Newsweek (they sign a contract) or getting credentials for a presidential debate (they fill out a secret service vetting form which I then sign off on too).

I speak for the MBA which has been a Delaware corporation but will, this week, be changed to a New Jersey Non-Profit corporation so that we can operate in the State of New Jersey; in order to set up the media liability insurance program we moved the company to New Jersey because such programs have to be registered with state insurance commissioners and New Jersey is "friendly" to the type of program we intend to offer.

That said, the MBA is not representative of the blogosphere anymore than the contributors to this site are. We have a specific mission at the MBA which is on our web site and I am the President and when I am operating within our mission, speaking in my capacity as President then I speak for the MBA as an organization.

In the discussions with AP, the MBA represents a specific blogger who asked us to help him in his case. When we speak to the AP on this matter we are doing so in order to advance his interest which is to clear up the current situation as best we can.

As I've already said elsewhere, I have never ever said that I represent "bloggers" and the accounts of this in the newspapers and blogs are entirely false. So, there is nothing to "make clear" to the AP. Do you actually think that AP is so unaware of the new media landscape that they would think for a moment that there is one person or one organization that can enter into some sort of collective bargaining agreement for bloggers?

To put your mind at easy, when I walk in to meet with the AP tomorrow I will be sure to tell them I do not represent "the blogosphere".

I have, however, been critical of Wikipedia going back to the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference where I took Dave Winer's side in the "great podcast debate of '05 over who would get credit, Dave or Adam Curry. I was in the room at Stanford Law School when Dave and Adam debuted that thing they called "podcasting". That's where I first met Jimmy Wales. I've debated Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia on PBS.org, attended his Wikimania conference at Cambridge, MA, and recently appeared at Middle State Tennessee University with Jimmy, Al Gore and John Seigenthaler of the First Amendment Center in Nashville. I've also had the privilege of carrying Jimbo's luggage. I know you will hate it but Al Gore actually introduced me at the event and we got our picture taken together but he was unable to convince me that I need to walk home from Murfreesboro to New York to reduce my carbon footprint.

Have you made it clear to the AP that you speak only for yourself?

I don't.

Without reading thru' many comments above, I'll leap in & thank our hostess Teresa, & the others who've been spending their time & energy tracking down facts & engaging in discussion. I remember earlier times this community has done similar work on a variety of issues; it's one reason I value it so much.

Fragano @2: Involvement in local community works/politics exposed me to 'house union' tactics. Little self-appointed groups with particular interests went off & made representations/negotiations with authority figures, who then refused to meet with the actual official community groups.

You asked "Which law firm?"

It varies from case to case. Here's one from Greenburg Traurig (yeah, I know the DC office was connected to Jack Abramoff somehow, blah, blah)

http://tinyurl.com/5ej8xu

As part of the insurance program, all MBA members whether they purchase insurance or not will get access to our referral program which will tap the insurance companies network of media law/first amendment lawyers around the country. The network includes some of the largest players in the media law practice around the U.S.

I have never been active on Wikipedia in anything other than my own name. ... I never heard of Robertissimo.

Also, Mr. Coleman? You may want to find a different phrase -- the original "j'accuse crowd" was right in the end.

And Mr. Cox? Paragraph breaks, man!

The earlier DMCA takedown notices against the Drudge Retort are immaterial to the case at hand, a red herring, since they were resolved to all parties' satisfaction. Why do you bring those up?

If you think the AP "over-reached" in this latest case, why do you need to negotiate with them to set guidelines for the use of their material? It seems to me that the Drudge Retort learned its lesson the first time around. The system works (except that the AP sent spurious takedown requests this time, which they shouldn't have). Why try to "fix" it?

According to Mr. Cadenhead's site, the AP hasn't dropped the takedown notices yet, but they're "rethinking their policies." Hopefully that doesn't mean pointing bloggers to iCopyright -- the article says, "'We are not trying to sue bloggers,' Mr. Kennedy said. 'That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music,'" so maybe the AP gets it. Time will tell. Anyway, Mr. Cox, if the AP does drop those takedown notices soon, and you had a hand in that, good on you.

Though, if one has a sufficiently interesting battle about notability, would that, in itself, be notable?

It was Dan who introduced me to the blogging world through which I came to read, know or email with some early bloggers like Dave Winer and Evan Williams of Pyra Labs. Quite frankly I did not "get" blogging at the time and when Dan pitched me and others on helping Evan pay his bills by tossing him some money I very foolishly declined. I think the folks who did give him money made out OK later ;-)

Speaking as one of the people who did donate to Pyra to help pay the bills way back when, the answer is "No." I never saw anything in return for my donations (in particular, no tech support), so we ended up moving our blog to MT after about 3 years with Blogger.

Robert Cox, @154:

I was in the room at Stanford Law School when Dave and Adam debuted that thing they called "podcasting".

And when was that? My guess is that you're referring to BloggerCon III in November 2004, which I also attended. Podcasting didn't debut there by any stretch of the imagination! As noted here, there were over 100K hits on Google for "podcasts" as of October 2004.

OTOH, maybe podcasting was new to you at BloggerCon, but to those of us who'd been blogging for over five years, it was old hat.

I can't speak so precisely about the rest of what you're saying, and these are minor points, but it does put you at 0 for 2 for those things I know about personally.

I was at BloggerCon II and III and IV so I guess that makes me three times better than you!

If you don't like the term I used fine but Adam and Dave put on a presentation in the first session at BCIII to... hmmm... what.... show everyone there what they had been working on. I called that a "debut". I believe that is the term Dave used too at the dinner the night before at the Chinese restaurant.

I am sorry you did not make money coughing up bucks to help Evan, I just assumed he took care of everyone when the time came.

Regardless, I am not sure how my not knowing that Evan never paid you back for helping him or that we disagree over the meaning of the word "debut" makes me "0 for 2". But other than that your reply is fascinating and now I am relieved that I kept my five grand.

Robert Cox @166: Interesting. Was the Media Bloggers Association involved with retaining Greg Herbert et al to work on the case? If so, how?

I bring them for the reason I said. Did you not read my post? I did not say they were material to the case at hand I said that a lot of the anxiety over what AP did was that it seemed to be capricious and come out of left field. It did not, there was two months of precipitating events that culminated in what happened last week. That's why I wrote "It is very important that people understand this because it makes clear that the AP is not on some wild rampage through the blogosphere, lawyering up to to go after every blogger who quotes an AP story in any way."

If you think the AP "over-reached" in this latest case, why do you need to negotiate with them to set guidelines for the use of their material?

I don't. I am going to meet with AP to see about resolving Rogers case. As I have tried to make clear, if that can be resolved to Rogers satisfaction (not yours by the way) then we can discuss other things. At this point, it seems pretty clear that AP is getting LOTS of free advice so what I offered to do last week when no one here had even heard of this case is largely moot. If AP wants my help I will give it. They've done good things for the MBA and I will be to be of service if I can be. I figure people here would do the same given the chance.

Why try to "fix" it?

My efforts here are new to YOU but I've made many efforts to get media lawyers, content owners and other potential litigants to try calling the MBA BEFORE they send a threat letter to blogger on the chance that within the MBA we can find someone to reach out to the blogger on a more positive basis and resolve disputes before their escalate. In this case, I would like the AP to be more transparent about what they are doing here. I believe if they are then there will be less confusion and therefore less threats against bloggers which is within our mission - we want to lower the legal risk of running a blog. That some folks here are oblivious to the number of threats and cases and the damage done by them does not change that.

The iCopyright story? Good grief, that story is complete and utter horsefeathers.

"maybe the AP gets it. Time will tell."

Hey! I actually agree with someone here. A first!

"Anyway, Mr. Cox, if the AP does drop those takedown notices soon, and you had a hand in that, good on you."

Yikes! Now I'm blushing.

So I will try to come back tomorrow after the AP meeting and fill you all in on how I sold you all out, singlehandedly destroyed The First Amendment and otherwise earned my twelve pieces of AP Gold. If I forget or fall asleep someone here please ping me. I am sure you have all my personal information in the dossier you've been assembling on me.

Goodnight, all!

"More recently, they have become involved in a copyright dispute involving The Associated Press, at the request of one of the parties, which has provoked a critical analysis of the self-image the organisation presents on its web page."

Trotting right along behind is Seth Finkelstein, who trimmed the sentence, erasing the link to ML in passing, to:

"More recently, they have become involved in a copyright dispute involving The Associated Press, at the request of one of the parties."

and inserting a link to Rogers Cadenhead's post. Mr Finkelstein's stated reason for doing this is "Added a ref, cut makinglight discussion - formally, not WP:RS, but in spirit, many accusations made are wrong (n.b. I'm an MBA member)".

All in all, I have to score this as an own goal on MBA's part.

I am not encouraged.

I believe I have enough knowledge of statistics to justify a suspicion of how he presents his figures on legal actions against bloggers. It is, at its core, the same filtering of the data which has blackened the reputation of those who investigate paranormal phenomena. He almost gloats about the number of times the card matches the prediction, and dodges the question of how many cards were drawn which didn't match.

Yes, I know his claims of almost supernatural hacking powers are meant to be something called a joke. Ha! ha! My own sense of humour is, I admit, somewhat esoteric.[1]

This is a highly literate community, accomplished in the manipulation of language and familiar with the tricks of shysters, shills, and scammers. Perhaps this inclines us too much to doubt Mr Cox, and sets too high a barrier in his path.

On the other hand, a stranger who makes the claims he does, who invites lawyers to roost in the rafters, and then tells us how they crap in the soup, maybe should stop advertising umbrellas.[2]

[1] I have used ... sarcasm. I knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire.

[2] We [heart] anoraks

No, it doesn't. A member of the U.S. Congress believes that the internet is a series of tubes. Virgin Media thinks they get to choose which webpages they load for you and how you can configure your router. Andrew Burt thinks he can send out DMCA take-down notices based on the output of a couple lines of code. Scammers think they can sue you for exposing their scams. As insane as the claims being attributed to you are, others have made claims just as mad with straight faces and lawyers. Trust in others good faith is hard to come by in these parts.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden @ 158: "I find I miss Jonathan Vos Post."

Same verbal patterns, sure. But does that bear on whether he's a faux-representative attempting to sell his faux-constituency out to the Powers That Be?

I think he's represented himself pretty well here. He's engaged in his critics, answered most every question asked of him, and has done so with a remarkably good sense of humor, given the circumstances. Flat jokes and self-indulgent reminiscences aside, has he given much cause to believe that narrative you've constructed of him?

There. (Silly little thing wandered off on me.)

Pericat, having admitted to being an MBA member, hasn't Seth Finkelstein laid himself open to challenges over his neutrality? At least within Wikipedia.

It certainly looks that way. Wikipedia's policy page Wikipedia:Conflict of interest states:

If you are involved in a court case, or close to one of the litigants, you would find it very hard to demonstrate that what you wrote about a party or a law firm associated with the case, or a related area of law, was entirely objective. Even a minor slip up in neutrality in a court-case article on Wikipedia for an active case-in-progress could potentially be noticed by the courts or their parties, and this could potentially cause real-world harm, not just harm to Wikipedia. Because of this, we strongly discourage editing when this type of conflict exists.

And Zochaka has written the following on Seth Finkelstein's talk page:

I'm quite willing to concede that the material I added to the Media Bloggers Association page, and which you removed, did not meet neutrality standards. But you say you are an MBA Member. How well does that sit with a Wikipedia ideal of neutrality?

The MBA website has a strong feel of self-promotion on the part of Robert Cox, and that may be carrying over to my reactions to the Wikipedia Page. Prior to our edits, it almost seemed a boast about long-past success. The page definitely needs to be brought up to date.

I'm suspicious. You're a member. This could develop into a hot topic. Should some less-involved third party take the lead on editing the topic? Zhochaka (talk) 07:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

1. AP's DMCA takedown notices to Rogers Cadenhead. He, of course, can go to anyone he chooses for help. Personally, I think the EFF is a better choice, but who knows what I'd do in the heat of the moment.

2. AP's meeting with "Media Bloggers Association" to establish standard that they wish to impose on all bloggers who want to quote their articles.

Defending Mr. Cadenhead doesn't require the imposition of standards on all bloggers. I mean, as near as I can tell, he hasn't done anything wrong. Why should his, or any other blogger's, behavior change?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Cox is meeting with the AP solely to deal with the takedown notices made against Mr. Cadenhead. (Note that the Robert Cox who has posted here has not actually made this claim.) Then why would the AP say that they're meeting with him to establish guidelines which would apply to all bloggers?

This is the bit that stays unanswered that we keep dancing around. For whatever reason, we keep getting pulled back into questions of Mr. Cadenhead's representation. My opinion is that he could have gotten better representation. Actually, he still can. Honestly though, he can choose a jar of grape jelly to represent him if he wants.

What I wonder are:

Has the AP gotten its own story wrong? Is it playing him? Or is his plan to negotiate a set of standards in exchange for the AP dropping the takedown notices?

If it's the last, then I guess we're supposed to take what the Robert Cox who posted here wrote literally, despite his mocking and sarcastic tone. If it's not the last, then there is a disconnect between what the AP says their meeting is about and what the Robert Cox who posted here says their meeting is about. It may be good to clear that up before the meeting.

Heresiarch, phzhyngviryl, lrf.

Robt. Cox (171):

I am glad you were at BloggerCon III.

I was at BloggerCon II and III and IV so I guess that makes me three times better than you!

Michael Roberts, note "your reply fascinates me" for future use. Also, I owe you an apology; I was in the middle of blogging it for the main page when this story grabbed hold of me.

John Chu (188), it would be good to clear that up, but I believe the meeting was yesterday.

Maybe I'm using the wrong term, but in order to vote for the Hugos this year, I had to be a supporting member of the convention. I became a supporter of the next couple conventions as well.

Regarding the Media Bloggers Association and Robert Cox, I don't expect people to take my word for it that they are helping bloggers. But I trust the recommendations of the group given to me by Liza Sabater and Oliver Willis, and the group's been valuable to me here. When you're dealing with a big company that only communicates with you in legal threats, cease and desist letters and DMCA takedowns, and you believe there's dialogue possible that will settle the disagreement without a lawsuit, you need somebody to open the right doors. Cox did that.

If there are better ways than using a group like this to represent some of our common interests, I hope people will pursue them. But in the meantime, they're there, and I think a blogger who gets in legal dutch ought to call them for help.

Some bloggers -- Markos Moulitsas I'm looking at you when I write this -- are too smitten with the idea that if we simply shake our collective fist in outrage the world will adjust accordingly, mindful of provoking our wrath.

This may be an oblique comment, but it is not off-topic.

If there are better ways than using a group like this to represent some of our common interests, I hope people will pursue them. But in the meantime, they're there, and I think a blogger who gets in legal dutch ought to call them for help.

I don't disagree with that. Finding the right people to help makes a huge difference.

I see considerable doubt as to whether Robert Cox is one of the right people. I share that doubt, but I am seeing the case from the general point of view, about this meeting to agree terms, rather than about the specifics of your case.

Jonathan Vos Post always kind of intimidated me. I feel oddly reassured to find that he was just bloviating. You banned him? I didn't find him that bad... Sort of entertaining, actually...

As to Robert Cox. I know his type -- a talker and into self-aggrandizement. That kind of guy can be a real useful guy in many situations. I rather suspect (as do you, TNH, obviously) that he really is Robertissimo -- but I don't see that kind of shenanigans as ruining him irredeemably for the Forces of Good. He just needs channeling. But like I say, check the dictionary. I tend to want to see the good side of people. (OTOH, I'm sometimes right.)

I'm sorely tempted to go volunteer my Drupal skills, such as they are.

Frankly, were it not for the fact that Oliver Willis is part of MBA, I doubt I'd feel so positive about the venture. But entirely aside from Cox's self-positioning problem (and again -- that's not necessarily a bad thing per se), it seems like a legitimate organization, or at least an organization which could be legitimized, if you see what I mean.

gloriosky.

Yeah, I'm kind of foggy on the whole massive criminal conspiracy that brought down Republican control of congress too.

Seriously, the entire impact of the MBA on my life has been material for a few blog posts (and $25 or so membership dues out of my bank balance). I had a long talk with Robert Cox a while back about my concerns, and I can attest that, everything else aside, he does believe in what he's doing.

I was lurking in this thread earlier, and thinking that whatever his self-promotion sins, he doesn't deserve the hate-storm he's been getting.

Yes, I removed the reference to this thread on the Wikipedia entry. Yes, it does leave me open to challenge. But I think I know Wikipedia's rules well enough to win the challenge. I declared my potential conflict of interest right up front. The key policy passage here is (my emphasis):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI#How_to_handle_conflicts_of_interest

"An important example is that unsupported defamatory material appearing in articles may be removed at once. Anyone may do this, and should do this, and this guideline applies widely to any unsourced or poorly sourced, potentially libelous postings. In this case it is unproblematic to defend the interest of the person or institution involved."

That puts me in a safe-harbor on that edit within Wikipedia.

As to personal connections, Robert Cox didn't ask me to do anything, nobody in the MBA asked me to do anything. I know Rogers Cadenhead (n.b. he didn't ask me to do anything) and have commented and emailed him about the case in general out of personal interest.

Interesting times.

Leaving aside the fact that putting enforcement of an open-ended set of subjective standards of offense in the hands of a partisan who hasn't, to this point, acted with perfect tranparency sounds like a bit of a risk for otherly-partisan bloggers, what recourse does someone who buys your liability insurance have if you decide that they've been naughty bloggers and expel them?

It seems to me that they would lose the insurance they've been paying for.

It also seems as if this would not be at all controversial if you were negotiating with the AP on behalf of your members, who presumably have empowered you to define their rights for them.

WADR, that's how it looks from here.

Seth @204: Teresa's post may or may not be defamatory; that word has specific legal meaning and I am so not a lawyer. I do not think it is, for the record. It is certainly not unsupported, not by a long shot. Moreover, her post did not appear within the WP entry, but was simply linked from it.

What you have done is to give the impression that MBA's adherents will brook no critical views of MBA in any fora in which they can possibly suppress such.

Well, where's the evidence to support any of those conclusions? We could look at what Robert Cox has been saying:

on this thread @ 150: "We used the term "guidelines" in the call in the OPPOSITE way that they've been conveyed, initially by the NYT. What I was talking about was, in effect, placing clear LIMITS on how far AP would go in enforcing their copyright, not the other way around."

and on the mediabloggers site: "In wrapping up my call with Jim Kennedy I expressed my view that it seemed incumbent on the AP to offer bloggers a better understanding of what the AP did find acceptable, [emphasis mine]" He places the onus on AP, not bloggers.

I simply haven't seen the claim "to represent all bloggers" that have been attributed to him anywhere in his own writing. Why trust secondary sources over primary? From what Robert Cox has been saying, his advice on how to deal with bloggers and Fair Use was offered casually, as an aside while dealing with the issue where he has a legitimate stake. The claim that he's acting as the official representative of Bloggerstan in binding negotiations is a fever dream of the AP's conception. It isn't Robert Cox making the claim that Robert Cox represents all bloggers. So why hold him accountable for it?

My favorite: The phrase, I am not a lawyer, appears only a few paragraphs above, We were approached for help by Rogers Cadenhead and, as we have done hundreds of times over the past four years, responded by offering him pro bono legal counsel.

However well intentioned the stated goals of the MBA are, the organization is pretty much a one man show and therefore it's operations, positioning, policies and communications are completely driven by your abilities and personality. Unfortunately, every action of the organization seems to be filtered and shaped by an obsessive need on your part to be recognized as an "A List" player.

Ultimately, that's probably the biggest source of the disdain you're seeing here - you want all the popularity, accolades and authority that accrue to "A List" bloggers without actually doing the hard work of learning how to create, sustain and nurture valuable conversations in the blogosphere. You've clearly spent enough time around "A List" people/blogs. Think about this for a moment: No matter how big their ego's are, how much of their content, goals and mission are actually driven by the need to be an "A List" player as opposed to the goal of providing valuable, interesting and popular conversations?

My suggestion? The mission of the MBA seems to have value. Everything you want can be had by making the MBA successful - not through PR stunts - but by actually helping MSM organizations adapt to the age of social media. After this all blows over, I hope you'll spend some time thinking about how you really want to measure your success and satisfaction in the blogosphere.

The policy is that potentially damaging material in Wikipedia articles gets removed immediately until there's a consensus that it's permissible, and this is an exception to the conflict of interest rules. It's a "do no harm" principle, and I acted on it, with full declaration of what I was doing.

"What you have done is to give the impression that MBA's adherents will brook no critical views" - Oh, please. Do you have any idea how much the MBA, and Robert Cox in particular, gets criticized by MBA adherents?

Look, excuse me for a moment - the guy involved in this case (Rogers Cadenhead) came in - set you (the group) straight - AND YOU DON'T CARE!. People are enjoying their ranting against the boogeymen, don't confuse them with facts. And you're criticizing me for doing a small thing to mitigate that?

Re-quoting: "we offered to provide any assistance we could in helping them draft some sort of guidelines that could be promulgated to the blogosphere so that bloggers would have a clear understanding of AP's point of view on copyright, excerpting and linking."

The key difference there is "I" versus "we." Robert Cox is not a lawyer. The MBA, however, has lawyers in it. Kevin Riggle confirmed it @ 168.

In fact, the counter-claim is sent by the person who posted the content to their ISP (in this case, Cadenhead). The ISP sends it on to the copyright holder. If the copyright holder doesn't tell the ISP that they have filed suit within 10 days, the ISP can return the content.

Also, Cox describes the ISP as having "no choice" but to remove the content. This is accurate in context ("to give both sides protections under that law"), but confusing. The ISP does have a choice -- they can decided that they believe the content is non-infringing, and keep it up. They're not then "protected" under the DMCA, but they're within their rights.

1) A right-wing flamer
2) A self-promoter

He should not be criticized without any chance at defense, in the middle of a big case, as:

"To summarize thus far: Robert Cox shoehorned himself into the story, fibbed about being the intermediator through whose agency all the bloggers got their credentials, already had a deal going with AP, and tried to force the Firedoglake bloggers to join the AP pool, which would have given AP complete access to their superior and quite valuable reportage.

Now we’re supposed to believe he’s dickering in good faith with the AP on behalf of blogdom? No way. Even if his motives were purer than Ivory soap, he should have more sense than to go anywhere near this issue."

Espeically given what Rogers Cadenhead said.

Perhaps I could have stated my third question better as "If the AP has gotten its own story right, then is his plan to negotiate a set of standards in exchange for the AP dropping the takedown notices?" Either the AP has gotten its story right or it hasn't. That is orthogonal to what Robert Cox has or hasn't said here.

My point is that it doesn't matter if he tells us whether or not he represents all bloggers. What matters is whether the AP thinks he does. In talking only about representing Rogers Cadenhead, we don't know anything about whether anyone thinks he represents bloggers as a whole (as if such a thing were possible).

I do find it a little disturbing that he has refused to disclaim representing all bloggers when asked several times now. Agreeing that he does not represent all bloggers, and stating that the AP knows this, would clarify things a lot.

As you point out, it's not what he's said. It's what he hasn't said. (We keep sliding into talking about Rogers Cadenhead whenever we approach this.)

Meanwhile....
I seem to be seeing different communications styles and values sets in this thread.

Mr Cox seems to be somewhat in the axes/regions of psychospace which are non-quantitative and with portions of e.g. the Myers-Briggs mappings which are far from the ones I inhabit (I fall into INTP, which is where one percent or so of the population is.... tends to be quantitatives, philosophically wanders around taking apparently random incomprehensible pokes [samplings...] at things that to most people seem completely unrelated to anything (there are relationships, they merely aren't intuitively obvious to those whose minds don't play jump-though-mental-hyperspace-via-arcanely-connected mappings games... I remember Mike Ford leaving Patrick and Teresa completely mystified at an implicit reference in something he said, they didn't have the referent information so what he said came off as incomprehensible for someone lacking the referent [the reference was to Dr Edward Anti-Teller of a poem about Edward Teller and his antimatter doppleganger])

ANYWAY...

Mr Cox seems to be oriented more toward e.g. the market communications industry mindset, or legally-oriented mindset. Me, I'm in the techie-geeky-nerdly space region, and marketing and engineering tend to be natural enemies, with organically different ways of perceiving the universe and interpreting the same stimuli and inputs, different methods of analysis/perception, different interests and values, different objectives, kinaesthetic differences, etc.

I fall into the extreme of messy-desk iconography---- I currently have only 33 windows open on this computer system, and no, I am not being the slightly be ironic about it. I usually have at least 40 or 50 open (Word gets unhappy with too many windows open, I am a not infrequent crasher of Word....). There are people I know who can't deal with having more than ONE window open on a computer.... There are people who need a highly linearly organize desk to work with and work very linearly. Then there are those who spread paper and computer windows in all directions and work hopping from one to the other in ways that are completely opaque to the bulk of the population, while the messy desk sorts can't grok how someone can work -neatly-....

But the bottom line is that my perception is that there are some very deep differences underlying the current conversation: that the same words in the same order, are not tied into the same mental constructs and concepts, that the underlying models of the psychosphere are inconsistent, even incompatible, regarding people's interests, values, goals, perceptions, aspirations, intentions, etc., such that even though there are a number of areas in which there probably is general agreement, the concepts underneath, are very much out of consonance with one another, the expectations and interpretations are failing to engage in postive fashions, and the resulting lack of harmony, are almost inevitable.

Look at what Robert Cox said @150:

"Doesn't it seem absolutely idiotic to anyone here that anyone in their right mind would have the chutzpah to claim they speak for the blogosphere? So, why then would you believe it just because you read it somewhere? I also addressed this in my recent post."

No personal offense intended to you, but this sort of idea is what I mean by people having their rant on, and not caring it's against strawmen.

AP said they are treating their meeting with Cox in that manner. They are not in this instance a secondary source, as they are the ones with whom Cox is dealing.

Cox appears in his responses in this thread to be rather pleased than otherwise that AP might have that impression of his organisation. In his place, I'd have been all over correcting that notion yesterday, on my own site and any others where the AP's assertion appeared. I would be very much concerned as to the harm that assertion could do to my organisation's reputation among the very community to whom I want to sell insurance and other services.

What Cox has said of his intentions is "As I have tried to make clear, if [the Rogers' case] can be resolved to Rogers satisfaction (not yours by the way) then we can discuss other things. ... If AP wants my help I will give it. They've done good things for the MBA and I will be to be of service if I can be." [emphasis mine]

I'm hearing two different things from Cox' comments here: on the one hand, that of course he doesn't represent all bloggers, what a silly idea, etc., and on the other hand, isn't it fun and potentially useful to him/MBA if AP has the impression he does speak for all bloggers when he chats with them about Rogers or fair use or whatever other concerns AP may bring up in the course of the meeting... but of course he'll disclaim any such wide-ranging influence if it seems necessary.

I figure if Cox can get away with it I can too. This is just a classic example of old media having no idea how the new media works.

-----------------
Jason Mosley
Enjoy Bacon!

Yes indeed, that requires chutzpah. However, he didn't answer the question with that statement (or the sentence I didn't paste here), now did he?

Anyone who's been on the 'Net for over fifteen minutes has run into idiots with chutzpah.

So, once more, is the AP aware that Cox is only speaking for himself?

A simple "Yes" or "No" will do.

The only people who think Robert Cox represents the blogospheres is the AP. Not you, not me, not Robert Cox is confused by this. Only the AP.

"Re-quoting: "we offered to provide any assistance we could in helping them draft some sort of guidelines that could be promulgated to the blogosphere so that bloggers would have a clear understanding of AP's point of view on copyright, excerpting and linking.""

Which taken by itself could arguably show that Cox wants bloggers to toe AP's line. But if you read it alongside the quotes I provided @ 212, it paints a different picture. It shows a man who thinks that a lot of the fighting over fair use could be solved if people communicated more clearly. Now, I don't agree that it's all an innocent misunderstanding: I think that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, aggressive copyright protection is done to intimidate users out of asserting their rights. Nonetheless, there's nothing in Cox's behavior that suggests he's playing the double agent here--he's Chamberlain, not Vichy.

John Chu @ 223: "I was asking questions. I wasn't drawing conclusions."

No problem--that's what I thought. I was just trying to answer your questions as best I could. =)

"Perhaps I could have stated my third question better as "If the AP has gotten its own story right, then is his plan to negotiate a set of standards in exchange for the AP dropping the takedown notices?" Either the AP has gotten its story right or it hasn't. That is orthogonal to what Robert Cox has or hasn't said here."

Agreed. However, isn't it pretty clear that the AP got its story wrong? Cox hasn't a once said that he plans to trade dropping the takedown notices for a set of standards. For him, the issues are only tangentially related. The reason it keeps getting back to Cadenhead is because to Cox, Cadenhead IS the central issue, and this hooflah is all over some minor, off-the-cuff comment.

"My point is that it doesn't matter if he tells us whether or not he represents all bloggers. What matters is whether the AP thinks he does."

Why?

"I do find it a little disturbing that he has refused to disclaim representing all bloggers when asked several times now."

What he has said is:

"Doesn't it seem absolutely idiotic to anyone here that anyone in their right mind would have the chutzpah to claim they speak for the blogosphere?"

and

"That take on the conversation was then twisted into the absurd notion that that MBA was going to meet with the AP for some sort of binding arbitration to negotiate terms on behalf of all bloggers."

So he's called the idea that anyone would try to negotiate on behalf of all bloggers "idiotic" and "absurd." When he said @ 157: "I don't speak "for myself"." I took him to mean that he does, in fact, represent MBA, and in this case, Rogers Cadenhead. So he refuses to say he speaks for no one but himself because it is not true.

Hell, it writes itself.

The problem is, what constitutes (and what does the A.P. believe constitutes) MBA membership?

According to the about page:

The Media Bloggers Association celebrates diversity of experience, purpose and opinion. Our members include veteran and newly minted bloggers, seasoned journalists and those who don't consider themselves journalists, political conservatives, moderates and liberals. We recognize that people join the Media Bloggers Association for various reasons: to promote freedom of expression in cyberspace, for mutual support, education, training, legal support, collegiality, greater visibility for their efforts.

I could easily see how that sort of blanket statement implies that membership is the norm, not the exception. If I'm missing an actual list of members, please let me know (not saying that sarcastically - I honestly can't find a list anywhere).

Am I on the right track?

If I agreed to meet someone for lunch, and they said it was a wedding, then would I have agreed to get married? It's the AP that's spouting nonsense, not Cox.

"In his place, I'd have been all over correcting that notion yesterday, on my own site and any others where the AP's assertion appeared."

Isn't that exactly what he's doing here?

"I'm hearing two different things from Cox' comments here: on the one hand, that of course he doesn't represent all bloggers, what a silly idea, etc., and on the other hand, isn't it fun and potentially useful to him/MBA if AP has the impression he does speak for all bloggers when he chats with them about Rogers or fair use or whatever other concerns AP may bring up in the course of the meeting... but of course he'll disclaim any such wide-ranging influence if it seems necessary."

Cox isn't approaching this as a hostile action. His point of view is that he's trying to mediate between two essentially benevolent beings. Remember, his prior association with the AP was very pleasant--he wants to help them avoid friction with the blogger community. Cox can offer his perspective on how the copyright takedown process works for bloggers (which he clearly has at least some experience with) without claiming to be Official Representative of All the Blogosphere.

Ron Coleman @ 232: Hallelujah.

Just following the fascinating discussion on ML, which has covered multiple lines of questioning and has had reasonable (and not so reasonable) disagreements within its own regular posters, shows that the diversity of bloggers is to great to ever be represented by one organization.

As to whether or not Robert Cox deserved the reaction he received on this post - I think it's the same sort of reaction and investigation that anyone who allows themselves to be touted as a representative (or tries to be elected as a representative) encounters. If he had not wanted to be given that status he should have made it clear, very quickly, particularly on his own blog that this was not the case.

As soon as that AP article went out, he should have started doing public relations damage control. I don't see how anyone, as active in the blogging community as he appears to be, could have not forseen the storm of criticism that would be coming after he was said to be meeting with AP to create guidelines.

But that did not happen. Without that quick and clear disclaimer, I think he opened himself up for all kinds of debate and investigation.

This should not surprise anyone -- most right-wingers are, and Coleman's political views are clearly right-wing. Still, I don't think I would want him as my lawyer.

That's what happened last year with the Libby trial: he was apparently quite happy to have it look like he'd arranged for the press credentials for everyone, even when he hadn't.
I haven't seen any signs that he will tell (or has told) AP he's a one-man organization - it may have more members than that, but there's no evidence of it, and he's doing all the talking - and I suspect he'd be happy to leave them with the impression that he's speaking for a majority of bloggers.

BTW, those @#$%^&*s in Congress are about to give Bush and Cheney immunity (in the form of giving it to the phone companies).

Because, after all, a person's only defining characteristic is the minority group to which he belongs. (Oh, look, I used "he" in a gender neutral sense, I must be sexist!) Everything else about them is unimportant.

____ 176: It's thirty pieces, and it's silver.

jerry 178: Get lost, drive-by idiot. Or get back on Robert's foot, sockpuppet, as the case may be.

Dave 180: He's really missed the boat on "aggrievéd innocence," hasn't he? And btw ♥ gives ♥.

Rogers 190: Yes, that's being a member of the convention. Members of the committee organize the convention and run it, make the deals with the hotel(s) etc. They have No Fun At All, or at least Not As We Know It.

And Kos is doing a little more than shaking his fist; he's giving them the finger and saying "take me to court; I'll win." And he's been to law school and knows his stuff.

John 192: shorter: Just because Cox isn't much of a blogger doesn't make him a useless idiot. I agree, much as his self-important sarcasm in this thread has turned me off.

Fragano and Serge, 199 & 200 disrespectively: I find that show just too embarrassing to watch. I guess it's my whole thing about comedy, which I won't bore you with yet again.

Seth 203: pericat is right, though IANAL either. What definition of 'defamatory' and 'unsupported' are you using? They have meanings distinct from 'negative' and 'that I disagree with', which seem to be how you're using them. Also, winning a Wikipedia war doesn't make you right, but then given your attitude and behavior I doubt anything could.

___ 217: You didn't read this thread very carefully. The opinions stated here after Rogers came in are much different than before, and continue to evolve as he continues to comment. Everyone is listening to Rogers talk about his own case; what we're taking with a grain of salt is his judgement of Robert.

___ 222: What on Earth do you mean, "without any chance at defense"? He's been defending himself on his own blog, and here, and no one has stopped him. Do you mean that someone should show their opinions about him to him beforehand, so that he can defend side-by-side? Sorry, that's too much to ask. No one is suppressing his defense. YOU are undermining his cause by suppressing dissent. YOU are the one who is violating people's rights, if anyone is.

___225: Please note the statement you quote is full of weaseling. It's what we call a non-denial denial. He's carefully NOT saying the specific thing he's been asked to clarify, and muddying the waters still further. (I did not read his "recent post" as his comments here have annoyed me enough that I don't care to.) This sounds like a powerboy play, actually, rather than that he's actually doing it, but what he did NOT say or even try to imply is that he's clarified that with the AP. I bet they think he's got way more bloggers behind him than he actually does.

___ 229: Then you haven't dealt with many weasels, and can possibly be excused. We have; take our word for it, that was weaseling. The motivation for the weaseling is up for debate, but not the weaseling itself.

heresiarch 231: Isn't Chamberlain bad enough? What Sudetenland of rights will AP annex next?

Ron 232: Now THERE'S a statement! I do not understand why Robert Cox could not have said that instead of weaseling when asked.

Michael 233: Yep. Even if we trust Robert Cox, we know better than to trust the AP as far as we can throw Mount Everest.

And if the cartoon had shown Mr Obama similarly, would you have regarded it as inoffensive?

What hordes of people in the USA seem to Not Get, is that there is a substantial percentage of the populace which feels disenfranchised. Unfortunately I don't have the URLs accessible which substantiate that yes, there really IS a constituency of annoyed women who regarded Hillary Clinton as a symbol/emblem/banner/icon of "the United States of America has been a nation for more than 300 years, women are the majority of the population, yet not ONCE has there been a woman occupying the position of President of the United States of America. Not one has there even been a major political party which has nominated a woman to be President. And the reaction of so much of the population is to make stupid, demeaning jokes about it.... and then expects that the stupid, demeaning jokes should get greeted with ire."

Being dismissed as irrelevant, not worth taking seriously, and then insulted and expected to consider the insults as tasteful.....

"Don't you have a sense of humor?"
Not for jokes by hypocrites whose skin isn't being abraded by the joke, no.... "It wasn't painful for me when I castrated the camel!" Somehow I don't think the camel would think that the joke was funny....

Similarly, if they say "Hillary Clinton doesn't know the difference between a welcoming ceremony and sniper fire!" they're not being sexist. If they call her a wicked witch, they are. Is that simple enough for you?

"Why, of course I answered Jim's question! Any intelligent person can see I did!"

And Seth, calling that non-answer "clear" and "phrased in conversational English" tells me you don't get out very much. Or perhaps you do get out, but only with lawyers and politicians.

It seems to me there's a difference between how a work of content is intended and how an individual chooses to receive it. (Hell, whole fields of literary criticism are founded on that principle.) Just because you choose to view it as sexist does not mean that it somehow embodies the platonic ideal of sexism.

"Do you have any idea how much the MBA, and Robert Cox in particular, gets criticized by MBA adherents?"

Internal criticism is laudable, but it's not like the slings and arrows of public examination.

"The policy is that potentially damaging material in Wikipedia articles gets removed immediately"

Now you're talking about potentially "damaging" where earlier it was "potentially libellous" being the issue requiring immediate attention. These are not the same things.

Your thinking that even a link to Teresa's post here is so problematic for MBA that you had to remove it right away is not doing a thing to support your position that MBA doesn't mind being criticized.

heresiarch @ 237 : "If I agreed to meet someone for lunch, and they said it was a wedding, then would I have agreed to get married? It's the AP that's spouting nonsense, not Cox."

That analogy's rather far afield of situation here, as it involves your taking on no obligations on behalf of anyone else no matter if other party's statement is true or not. A closer one would be if you were meeting a third party with a view to negotiating use of their land, which your neighbours also wanted to use, and that third party publicly stated that you were speaking on your neighbours' behalf as well as your own. If you allowed that interpretation to stand, your neighbours might be excused for expressing their annoyance. And if your response is snippy, condescending and otherwise mixed, that's not going to help.

In my reading of them, Cox' responses here are not nearly so clearcut as they seem to you. And the 'News' page of the MBA site has not been updated to refute or clarify AP's representation of Cox' role in today's meeting, but rather the reverse.

That leads me to a simple question. Does Robert Cox realize how utterly in the wrong the AP are in this issue? Does he plan to tell the AP that it was legally irresponsible and immoral to send the takedown notices that they did, and that they need to recognize that Rogers was well within the bounds of fair use and bloggers don't need a set of AP written guidelines to tell them when and what they can quote? Or does he plan to get Rogers out of trouble (which certainly is a good thing), and then simply rubberstamp some set of quoting rules set up by AP? Because if he does, this is only going to get worse in the future, as next time AP can whine that they worked with the MBA to set up these rules and they don't understand why the person they're C&Ding couldn't just follow them.

#231: I'm sorry. It would have been easier for me to recognize that you were merely attempting to answer my questions if I hadn't interpreted your words as labeling them conclusions.

In any case, it's not clear to me that the AP got its own story wrong. For all I know, the AP really thinks that Robert Cox represents many more bloggers than he actually does. If that's the case, Robert Cox can say whatever he wants, but the AP will still trumpet whatever comes out of a meeting with him as a standard for all bloggers. That's why what the AP thinks matters (and why whether or not he claims to represent all bloggers not nearly as much).

Besides, I am a sexist. Why not call me up and ask? On the other hand I have written quite a few pro-Hillary pieces, both on my blog and on Dean's World. You could look it up. I have, however, never applied my sexist views to her. In contrast, I have a crush on Margaret Thatcher and I will not apologize for that. I am still flesh and blood, even if I am a lawyer.

Left-wing bloggers (and other left-wing living things) have, by the way, been very happy to have me as their lawyer. But, hey.

As to the merits, Adam , I really cannot fathom how the passage you cite in any way supports the assertion you make. It's a broad statement about what is a broad coalition and, yes, it contains an element of puffery as any association website will, but there is nothing remotely like a claim of exclusivity in it.

And let's be honest: No one reacting to the press reports and accusing Bob Cox of claiming to speak for the entire blogosphere was basing their claims on that passage. This is just an attempt to backfill.

A couple of other points:

Contrary to what one might very reasonably assume, the AP people we have been talking to neither write nor dictate AP news coverage (as opposed to the issuance of a statement). That coverage is written by AP reporters utilizing whatever conventions for these kinds of things they have in place. As is the case regarding most news organizations, the issue of how the AP "covers itself" is a tricky one and perhaps one the AP has not quite figured out yet.

Similarly, the MBA and Bob Cox do not get the opportunity to vet coverage before it is published, as everyone here knows. Erroneous reporting is dealt with as well as can be, but, again, as you all know, once an inaccurate report hits the ether, it lives forever. There has been a good amount of inaccurate reporting and commenting that has caused some of the overheating here.

And some of that overheating is due to other things entirely.

Dan , let me get this straight: You do or you don't want the MBA to represent all bloggers?

I still don't think the intention of the piece was necessarily sexist. I will admit to disliking Hillary Clinton, but this dislike is predicated on her and her husband's behavior while he was in office, and on some of the policies and programs she favors—gender doesn't enter into it. In fact, if there is one thing I do respect Hillary for, it is running in spite of the obstacles that her gender posed. I do think it is about time we had a female President—I just don't think it should be Hillary.

This is why I hate political correctness so much—if I had found it through some other context, I could see myself linking to that image on my blog without any sexist intent, just because I thought it was an amusing statement of how decisively Obama carried the nomination over Hillary—like a house landing on her. Had I done so, then any accusations of sexism would have come as a complete surprise to me.

But thanks to PC, I need to watch anything I say or do because there's a chance I might accidentally offend someone in some completely unintended way.

I'm going elsenet. Some of the answers on this thread are getting so twisted that I fear I may need a 4-space opthalmic prescription to read them.

(and this from the guy editing a story which involves a poker-playiong King of England, a chorus of singing ricksha drivers, assorted policemen, and a sino-jewish band of fashion pirates.)

(This is just based on my understanding from what I have read. IANAL, but I do like using the acronym because when else would I get to type ANAL in all caps like that?)

pericat @251 - but those comments he left were so weird and cross-purposed that I honestly thought he was a sock puppet. Even Teresa thought so! I think Xopher's reading is correct. He's angry that we're saying "Who does Cox think he is?" -- after he's gone to such lengths to establish himself as a Player, too! Naturally, his kneejerk reaction is to say, well, who are you?

I'm thinking the entire train wreck of miscommunication in this thread is crystal clear at this point. We should probably just scrub it and start over. Ugh.

The more appropriate analogy is that Cox and some other people are saying they are having lunch, while the AP is saying it's a wedding.

So what matters is who has more credibility. Since the MBA manages to come off as an insurance scam based on their web site, AP's version of the story seems more credible to me. If it's not the truth, MBA should have a big front-page article disclaiming it, because obviously somebody at AP has miusunderstood.

I'm always suspicious of entities that are willing to let misunderstandings of that scope stand uncontested.

Dan , let me get this straight: You do or you don't want the MBA to represent all bloggers?

Please don't get in the habit of answering what should be ridiculously simple questions with more questions. It's unbearably tedious, and it advances nothing in terms of understanding.

That's quite a cast of characters!

That's like saying "Thanks to people's voices, I need to watch where I walk, because there's a chance I might step on someone's foot in an unintended way and they'll complain." The reason that it's problematic to insult a woman using witch-related imagery is not that some consortium of liberals has declared it "officially un-PC." The reason is that our culture has imbued the comparing of women to witches with sexist implications, and so people who have suffered from sexism or care about others who have suffered from sexism have legitimate reasons to find such comparisons offensive, regardless of your intentions.

@259

Also NAL, but I believe you are more or less right as far as the technical aspect of the law goes; on the other hand, I think it should be clear to anyone familiar with fair use that the cases at issue would without question be found to be fair use by a court based on a reading of the law and on precedent. When I playfully tap my friend's arm with my fist, sure it's possible that under certain contexts that could be assault, and only a court could give a definite ruling, but I'd still argue that it's colloquially correct to call what I did "perfectly legal."

I won't quite give you what you're asking for. One reason is that it's unnecessarily intemperate language. Another is that seeing as how we are in the process of discussions with the subject of the remarks you want me to make, it would be very un-constructive to do that. That's just common sense, right?

I will say this: The stated views of the AP as to what does and does not constitute fair use diverge very widely from my professional understanding of it.

Now, having said that, as a general proposition, attorneys, and in particular law departments of organizations, draw their "official" lines about legal matters affecting their business several conceptual increments away from what can confidently be said to be a firm legal position. Much of my work, for the MBA and for my private clients, involves testing those claimed lines and watching them crumble. I write about this phenomenon frequently on my IP blog; here's a recent example.

Frequently, however, it makes sense for both parties to a dispute to leave those lines intact and to save the testing for another day.

In this case, for example, we all are clear now that most bloggers will never be members of the MBA. Some non-member may choose, at his own expense or perhaps courtesy of the EFF or the ACLU or someone else, to litigate these issues; perhaps he will like the outcome, and perhaps not. It is also possible that such a person will join our group or already be a member, and indeed be represented by the MBA, and that the other party will be the Associated Press. We are not discussing becoming part of the AP or ceding the right or ability to represent bloggers in cases where a dispute cannot be contained.

Blogging is a social networking phenomenon, right? We're trying to find ways to keep all kinds of channels open for people and companies to do what they want to do on the Internet without wringing each others' necks. If necks need to be wrung, though, I like that, too.

http://tinyurl.com/5q8byp

The word "damaging" was used a summary to encompass a range of categories. There's a difference between "criticism" and "hatchet-job". If I say, this post, this specific one, right here, this single item, is a hatchet-job that has no place being echoed in contexts that imply it has any accuracy, that should not be taken that the MBA can't stand criticism. To turn it around, one could talk of the impression of whiny A-list entitlement, that any rant deserves maximum publicity otherwise it's censorship (tedious: I didn't say censorship is being claimed, I'm inverting your point to a similar hypothetical absurd point).

Disclaimers: I'm not the MBA, I'm not acting for the MBA, I haven't communicated in any way with Cox for a long time. I just got annoyed at how much people were dumping on him, without even giving him a chance to defend himself before the attacks were all over the place.

On your second point, I don't know that the fair-use-or-not argument is entirely so cut and dried. Quoting from this Ars Technica article:

The AP objects that this isn't fair use. "AP considers taking the headline and lead of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation," wrote an AP lawyer. The idea appears to be that posting the first few paragraphs of a news story, especially a breaking one, really does amount to republishing the heart of the piece verbatim, and it might be enough to keep users from checking out the original source.

This does make a certain amount of sense to me—when I was in Journalism class in college, we were instructed that when writing for newspapers, we had to encapsulate the entirety of the story in the first couple of paragraphs, so that people would get the gist of the story, then fill in details with the rest. This was because experience had shown most people didn't bother to read more than the first couple of paragraphs of most newspaper articles anyway.

Further down:

Should cases like this ever go to court, the AP would no doubt argue that a "substantial" portion of the work was used (factor three), enough so that people didn't visit the original story (factor four), and that the use wasn't "transformative" because most of the posts in question had little user content beyond the quote (factor one). All of these are debatable, of course, but the point is that they would actually need to be debated before a judge in order to know if the use in question was fair.

So, it's one thing to argue that a work is fair use or not. But on the other hand, nothing obligates the AP to say, "Oh, well, that's all right then, that use is fair." They are perfectly within their legal rights to send cease-and-desist notices, and pursue the matter in court if the other party does not back down.

It's up to a judge to decide if a particular use is fair—and what's worse, a judge deciding that it would be OK for The Drudge Retort to quote so much of News Story A does not automatically mean it would be all right for Making Light to quote so much of News Story B. The precedent would help the court make the decision in the case of Making Light and News Story B, but it would still have to be litigated. (In my NAL understanding of the matter, of course.)

Which is annoying, since litigation has gotten so costly that a lot of the time large organizations are able to prevail by threat—the smaller parties usually can't afford to defend themselves in court.

Still to come: The Adoration of the Credentials, ...

Aside: I think I like this Ron Coleman. We should keep him.

Also, as soon as the kids are through college and I'm done with med school (note to self: apply to med school) I think I'm going to law school. You can just start calling me Jubal now.

So Teresa started digging. And this isn't a hatchet job -- it's discovery, Seth. Why shouldn't we go ahead and post what we discover as we discover it? If Cox needed a chance to defend himself, he probably shouldn't go around self-aggrandizing, and if MBA wants an identity separate from Cox's self-aggrandizement, then I suggest MBA does something about that in particular, instead of waiting until it all comes out and then complaining that it all looks so smarmy.

It looks dishonest because, frankly, it's not too honest. And Robert Cox, or the MBA, could easily clear something up at any time by, you know, blogging about it -- but the only article Robert has written is all about how he (and The AP) are misunderstood by all us dirty fucking hippies.

I am underwhelmed by that, as you can imagine.

AP also asserts prohibiting paraphrasing etc. the contents of its articles, however.

As for how people read things--that's not up to the publisher/editing, that's up to the reader. The publisher/editor/presentation of material can facilitate making reading the material harder (using Zapf Dingbats instead of Time Romans, perhaps...., or brown print on a black background) or easier (generally readable font on e.g. light blue background in a comfortably-for-reading font size, comfortable to read spacing, and sentences which are much less convoluted than the ones I usually write....) but can't completely -force- a reader to read in a particular way (or with comprehension the way the author/editor/publisher intended/expected).

And of course what the reader reads is up to the reader. Nobody said it wasn't. What the AP says (at least by what I quoted) is that, because of the way readers do read (mostly only reading the first couple paragraphs of a work), quoting the first couple of paragraphs is effectively quoting a substantial enough portion of the entire story to make it unnecessary to view the longer work—and hence no longer a fair use.

It's for a judge to say whether or not that is a valid argument, but from my own experience in education I can understand where they're coming from (albeit not sympathize with their assertions or their methods).

There is a very good article on this, which I unfortunately cannot find right now.

A lot of people hear "X is sexist", and think, "but I think X, and I'm not a sexist. Therefore X must not be sexist." This usually continues with, "how dare you calling me a sexist?"

Why doesn't the witch comparison raise red flags for you? Perhaps the answer is that you have never considered the actual experience of women in the world. I highly recommend reading some autobiographical works by women who reflect on their experience as women.

I understand that you're probably a busy man, and don't have time to learn anything about how half the world's population lives. As a quick heuristic, I recommend the following: "is there an equivalent version of this with the genders swapped?" If the election had gone the other way, and Obama were portrayed as the Wizard of Oz (the closest male equivalent in Oz), the message would be very different. It's not a perfect heuristic, since you'll find plenty of false equivalences but it's a good start. Hofstadter proposed a related heuristic, which is also interesting, and which Xopher demonstrated above.

If you're not thinking about how women will react at all, why not? Surely if you're going to post something on your blog, you have at least some thought for how your readers will react. Aren't women as important?

OK, so your sexism is of the unconscious sort, rather than Schlafly's intentional sort -- but if you sit there and defend yourself rather than going out and educating yourself, then you're moving in the wrong direction. As for me, I'm trying to move past defensiveness to a place where I've got nothing to defend. But it's a long journey.

And the actual voting totals in the nomination for Sen Clinton versus Sen. Obama, did NOT involve any really large difference in the votes, the difference I seem to recall seeing, involved the "superdelegates," especially the ones declaring early and often for Sen. Obama. Note that Masschusetts voters in the primary voted plurality if not majority for Sen. Clinton versus Sen. Obama (or any of the other candidates on the Democratic ballot). Sen Kerry, however, who is a superdelegate, declared for Sen Obama--and one of the results of that was that there there is another Democrat who will be listed on the fall primary ballot for contesting the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Kerry. (That is, a quarter or so of the voting members at the Democratic convention a few weeks ago in the state, nominated the other fellow for the Democratic nomination for Senate for the upcoming election....)

But to reiterate--the actual number of votes from people voting in primaries, was NOT any sort of landslide popularity contest in which the vote totals for Sen Obama were hugely ahead of the vote totals for Sen Clinton, the vote totals were a LOT closer than that. The big difference I think was in the superdelegate totals (and in the news media cheerleading urging whoever was ahead at one particular moment was the clear and overwhelming winner).

The reporting on the situation was anything but impartial and nonpartisan.

And the jokes about the situation, again, are offensive in a whole bunch of different ways--were there such jokes about McCain versus the former Gov. of Massachusetts losing out to McCain rather early even in the campaign (yeah, he was government and I can't even think of his name at the moment--that's how much of a positive (not!) impression I have remaining of him!), and were any of them so -pettily- derogatory?!

[snickering.
Was this intentionally referencing margins not wide enough to hold proofs?]

If there is no need for the rest of the story/article, then, why should AP go to the effort and expense and exertion of having any articles longer than the initial couple of paragraphs?!

With an intent of the initial paragraph or two to grab the prospective reader's attention and interest, one might think that effective marketing would include quoting of the start of articles as a way to get people hooked to read the rest of the article.... and in fact lost of websites do do that sort of things, provide a paragraph or so upfront, with a link to the rest of the material....

Let me thoroughly disclaim here I'm replying from my personal perspective, from the viewpoint of my own thoughts and about general issues, and will attempt to answer you by conveying my feelings about that.

When you say that, what comes across to me is something I deeply hate about the blogging world, the abusive, bullying, arrogant, conduct endemic to A-listers. It sounds like: "Why should we people with big megaphones, who can smear and attack someone to thousands, maybe millions, care about any sort of accuracy and fairness? What does it matter if we publicly accuse someone based on a mistaken impression or third-hand report? It's "conversation"! We have a legal right to do it, as long as we don't cross over certain lines. It's all the fault of the targets anyway - they brought it all on themselves for not immediately catering to us, considering us to be the center of the universe, because of what we can do to them."

If you detect a certain parallel here with the worst of the press, that's deliberate.

If someone is going to make serious accusations to a huge audience, it is REALLY, REALLY so tough, so requiring of elaborate philosophical discussion and analytic justification, to give an opportunity beforehand to explain?

Here: There's a list of MBA members. Many are approachable to the writers of this blog. Is it SO HARD to ask privately to some of them "What's this MBA - is it for real? And who is this Cox guy, is he legit?" before dumping this stuff all over the place?

What does it say that I'm taken to be sort of the "bad guy" (roughly) here?

Because those are the names they put on their own lawn signs, bumper stickers, and lapel buttons, that's why.

Some of what I find most offensive about the cartoon includes the inaccuracies and promulgation of misinformation--the denotation of a huge giant difference and crushing defeat etc. It was crushing, but NOT for the reasons implied--it was crushing because, again, Sen Clinton in many ways embodied the long struggle of women in the USA to move from a position of legal powerlessness/chattel, to a position of access to power, resources, fame, control, etc., and to get so close, and then get BELITTLED about it... snarl.

No, Sen. Clinton is not my ideal of a candidate for office, etc., but she was a -real- candidate for office who was female, who had suffered public indignities and humiliatons which in some ways are archetypal of the -sorts- of crap dumped on women for millennia, and who has been serving as an elected official and representative of the people of the state of New York for how many years now?

There are other archetypes buried in there or which resonate--the one of the wife and women generally told, "your time will come, you can go for your degree AFTER your husband finishes his and you worked the scut job so he could go to grad school/medical school/law school..." and then after the husband gets the Ph.D/MD/JD dumps the old model wife who worked to put the husband through school and minded the kids etc., for a shiny new young "trophy wife"

Why -shouldn't- there be an enormous capacitor load in anger on the part of a very large percentage of the (female) population of the USA to see that sort of thing apparently playing out on the national political level, especially when a whole bunch of tacky cartoons and jokes accompany it?!

AP has dones its part I think as regards slanted and often demeaning coverage of the election....

What the acronym "MBA" denoted to me until the advent of the entries in Making Light about an allegedly blogger association in the past few days, was the degree "Master of Business Administration," the possessors of such degrees, and to a degree the contempt that's been aimed in the direction of the management and (non)leadership styles of quite a number of MBAs... there is, for example, an article in the current Locus magazine about someone who went from heading up Random House to changing careers, having been a banker before going into publishing and them axing all sort of people from the publisher.... there were places in the article when the tone turned just shy of vindictive with a theme of "what goes around comes around, this fellow's removal is one that he amply earned for his offensive policies and obnoxiousness."

(No, I am NOT saying that an MBA automatically is noxious and offensive... rather, that there are a number of negative connections attached to the term in contemporary society as regards the actions of Corporate America in such things as outsourcing offshore, offshoring work, cutting payroll when a company is profitable, focus on short-term profits and exterminating long-term investment, etc..... there are MBAs who haven't destroyed companies, whose such as the founder of Au Bon Pain, got the MBA to be better able to continue running a business grown to large international size, but the term, especially the past 7.5 years, has garnered more and more negative connotations regarding how someone with one runs businesses/the US Government).

As for a blogger organization.... there are millions of bloggers. AP negotiating with MBA, MBA is de jure representing its members and those who have agreed/are willing to have MBA represent them. De facto, AP seems to be acting as if MBA represents all bloggers or bloggers in general.

AP and MBA are busily establishing one or more precedents, and legally precedents carry a lot of weight... that those of use who are NOT represented by MBA are getting shafted by perceptions that AP apparently is promoting, isn't getting out to the public and probably legal/governmental authorities from at least AP....

"I have had my own direct experience with editors of the Keith Olbermann page which suggests this is the case. I edit a blog called Olbermann Watch. Not that it was ever my goal in life but I am now the leading blog critic of Keith Olbermann and a recognized authority on Keith Olbermann (citation: quoted in Washington Post, New York Observer, Hartford Courant, Online Journalism Review, etc.).

Not only do I know a great deal about Keith Olbermann, I also have a good deal of familiarity with some of the Wikipedia editors who have watch-listed his entry — liberal fans of Keith Olbermann. Some of these fan/editors have declared online that the Keith Olbermann page is their “pet project” and, not surprisingly, the entry reads more like a “fan site” than an encyclopedia entry. Some of these editors have openly sought to use that page to market their own fan sites and forums. Not surprisingly, the Keith Olbermann entry is massively non-NPOV."

(Source: PBS)

Here: There's a list of MBA members.

Where, please? I mentioned above being unable to find any such list (235), and wasn't kidding.

If someone has left a written trail online and that is referrenced heavily in an investigation of why they might be speaking to a major media organization, how is this wrong?

Isn't going to their own words giving them a chance to speak for themselves?

Of course, anything can be taken out of context, but the post had many links to the content and many (though not all, by any chance) of the people here read those.

But communication in this community starts with your blog. The first place anyone one went for information on Robert Cox and the MBA was their blog, for their take on it. And there wasn't much there. How else is Teresa going to get the information? Send an email query? Make a phone call?

**wanders off, singing "I've Got a Theory"**

"I suspect that Fox News Channel thought this would be a great way for viewers to show loyalty to their favorite FNC primetime shows but rumor has it that these ringtones can be used to ward off liberals. They turn cellphones into the equivalent of garlic to vampires."

(Robert Cox's old blog)

"m" currently lives about a block off the main UM campus in Ann Arbor where she is at liberty to stroll to class and her part time job in a school office. I have her exact home and work address, phone numbers and a satellite photo but I am not going to publish any of that here. The last four digits of her home phone are 3746; her work phone is 9593.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061109183931/mediabloggers.org/members/

Does your sense of self-importance make you believe that "if I don't know about it, it must be a sham"?

What kind of integrity do you have if you are willing to believe the spin of the very company that is supposed to be your enemy yet you don't waste time smearing the organization that may end up helping you next time you get sued for something you post on your blog?

Oh right, you'll have your little friend Kos covering all your grand legal expenses. Good luck with that.

Here's my posts about this case:

Hansell lies, AP spins and the blogosphere smears

AP have their legal vampires chasing bloggers. I blame Hilary Rosen.

More about the AP copyright takedowns against Rogers Cadenhead

Netroots' bloggers boycott of Associated Press is working

Fighting for our right to inquiry, creativity and dissent

EXCLUSIVE : Robert Cox answers some questions about his coming meeting with AP

We need to keep the focus on Rogers Cadenhead and Fair Use

I have to keep killing that website in Windows Task Manager because some stupid dialog box keeps popping up about sub-frames navigation and there is no other way to get rid of the thing....

========

#293 Shi

I could not tell if the material were quoted from elsewhere or not, and couldn't quite figure out the basis of posting it. I did however find both the content and presenting that content, extremely distasteful/disconcerting/objectionable/slimy/corrding-graveyard-at-sundown-squicky.

"Your Majesty, you have dined at my table. I am an Anarchist, not a Bolshevik, and some obligations are sacred."

"Ah..." The King studied his cards. "Forgive me." He decided. "Two cards, please. Lady Helen."

Two cards flicked across the table. "Two for a royal straight flush," announced Lady Helen.

"Yes," he murmured absently, placing them in his hand. "Two cards for..." He paused, and looked up. "Henry, I do believe your daughter has stacked the deck."

"Thoroughly, sir," agreed the Duke, laying out four of a kind.

Shii links to, a blog (Watching keitholbermannwatch) that comments on Robert Cox's blog (keitholbermannwatch). Following the linkage through, I found myself on Cox's blog, where the full creepifying majesty of the comment is visible. That quote is representative of the original text, and is not taken out of context.

The short version appears to be that he did not like the attitude of a commenter on his site, and so researched her and outed her in detail, not just with her name, but with enough identifying details that anyone who wanted to find her in real life would be able to.

I have a phrase in mind for that...what was it again, Seth @280? Ah, yes... abusive, bullying, arrogant, conduct.

Hmm.

http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs14-stk.htm

"Are You Being Stalked? Tips For Protection"

"Stalking refers to harassing or threatening behavior that is engaged in repeatedly. Such harassment can be either physical stalking or cyberstalking.

" o Physical stalking is following someone, appearing at a person’s home or place of business, making harassing phone calls, leaving written messages or objects, or vandalizing one’s property.
" o Cyberstalking involves using the Internet or other electronic means to harass.

"Either type of action may or may not be accompanied by a credible threat of serious harm. But both types can cause psychological damage, and each can potentially lead to an assault or even murder...."

Is it SO HARD to ask privately to some of them "What's this MBA - is it for real? And who is this Cox guy, is he legit?" before dumping this stuff all over the place?

Dumping which stuff? All those links to stuff Cox wrote? If I read all the linked articles, stuff Cox put his name to, and get a bad taste in my mouth, am I supposed to ignore it because some other stranger says he's a good guy?

What does it say that I'm taken to be sort of the "bad guy" (roughly) here?

That's a subjective impression, surely? I've missed any comments where you were characterized as a bad guy.

Yes, to me that stuff is seriously creepy/icky/repulsive/squicky/etc. It's far, far, far, far beyond "lacks a sensitivity chip."

Words like "quisling" and "collaborateur" are pinging in my neurons, regarding Mr Cox, after reading the firedoglake entry link.

I don't like Absolutely Fabulous, either (I know, turn in my gay card). I think that daughter should pick up the nearest heavy object and crush her mother's skull with it, bettering the world instantly. I don't enjoy watching people who, if I knew them for real, I'd be sorely tempted to push in front of a bus. It's just not funny to me. I don't know why.

b10621 297: Careful, that door has a nasty habit of swinging shut on you. Bye! *sigh of relief*

pericat 304: I kinda snarled at him early on.

Look, the AP/MBA meeting is over, and bloggers haven't been sent down the Trail Of Tears.

Regrets, I really can't spend much more time on this thread today (in retrospect, I shouldn't have gotten into it in the first place, sigh).

I see what you mean about AbFab, too, though part of the humour is wondering why Saffron doesn't do her mother in.

What do you make of The Vicar of Dibley?

First, I don't think doing and presenting research on Robert Cox's actual writings is really equivalent in any way to misquoting second-hand reports of what he may or may not have said offline. Teresa is showing us Cox's public face. Again, if he doesn't want that public face to be known now that he's a Player talking to The AP, then ... I know how this sounds, but ... he should have thought of that before trying to be a Player talking to The AP.

I find it an entirely normal activity, upon hearing The AP saying they're talking to a blogger group that a lot of people haven't heard of, to Google that group, then, upon finding its own public face, to wonder who these people really are, dig further, and find some really scary stuff.

Once that happens, no, my first impulse would in fact not be to check with other people before publishing it. That would be very strange -- because this is, I reiterate, his public face. It is work he has published. That makes it public. If he doesn't want it read by everybody, he should damn well not publish it. I don't know why that is so difficult to understand for people who work publishing things.

Second -- am I understanding you correctly that you see this as Teresa Nielsen Hayden, A-list blogger, throwing her weight around? Because, flattering as that image is, and as attractive as it makes you or perhaps Cox feel to be the underdog -- Cox is the guy representing bloggerdom to The AP, at least as far as The AP is concerned. Which means pretty much as far as the public eye is concerned.

That doesn't make him an underdog.

In fact, if he is somebody disreputable, it pretty much makes him somebody who should be examined. We are doing so. If that makes him uncomfortable, well, that's part of what being a Player entails. He might have given a little thought to public perception earlier. Or be doing so now.

Now, when you say, "Why should we people with big megaphones, who can smear and attack someone to thousands, maybe millions, care about any sort of accuracy and fairness?" I'm just really forced to ask -- what about Teresa's links to Cox's own writing was inaccurate or unfair? I've just reread the post, just to make sure I'm not shooting off at the mouth. I literally have no idea what you mean with this characterization. She's linking to his own blog. OK? What could be fairer than that?

I understand that you're describing your own emotional reaction here. That's fine. I can certainly understand that if I were the target of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I would also be very, very afraid. But I am not talking to The AP, and I am not representing myself as the guy who legitimized bloggers to the mainstream press. (Neither are you, actually -- you probably don't have the dogs in this fight you think you do.)

You also say, "It's all the fault of the targets anyway - they brought it all on themselves for not immediately catering to us, considering us to be the center of the universe, because of what we can do to them." No. Robert Cox brought this on himself for self-aggrandizing behavior in the national press, while presenting public rhetoric we find objectionable. What are we doing to Robert Cox other than focusing a teeny-tiny sliver of the public's attention on him? Are we saying mean things about him? Have you read the mean things on his site? How about Ron Coleman's link back to this thread? This is the Internet. Mean things will be said.

Again, you say, "If someone is going to make serious accusations to a huge audience, it is REALLY, REALLY so tough, so requiring of elaborate philosophical discussion and analytic justification, to give an opportunity beforehand to explain?"

What serious accusations would those be? We're linking to his public writings. What do you think he should be given the opportunity to explain about them? What they look like when collected in a pile in the sunlight?

You say, "Is it SO HARD to ask privately to some of them 'What's this MBA - is it for real? And who is this Cox guy, is he legit?' before dumping this stuff all over the place?"

I'm sorry, there's been this innovation you may have heard of; it's called the Internet. Is it so fricking HARD to explain this in ADVANCE on your so-called "WEB SITE" before talking to The AP as though you're bloggerdom?

Apparently so.

Anyway, I appreciate that you feel as though you've walked into a firestorm not of your making. Don't worry about it. I salute you for coming back to this thread and trying again, and I do honestly believe there's no Eeeeevil Conspiracy afoot to protect Cox's good name. But really. Cox did bring this on, by his own writings and actions, and he could still easily defuse it by presenting himself honestly on his own page, you know?

Seriously -- if the problem with the MBA site is technical, drop me a freaking line at michael@vivtek.com and I'll help you fix it. (Maybe Monday; my schedule really is pathetic this week -- I'm still pretty much on Tuesday's work, sigh.) But if it's just because it's all smoke and mirrors, then please -- don't make it all look worse. Sheesh.

Last point -- I don't think you're being taken to be the bad guy here. You made an edit on Wikipedia at a really badly timed point, and got sucked into a maelstrom. It's a tempest in a teapot, don't worry about it. Go for a nice walk (I just got back from the beach myself.) I honestly don't think anybody's got it in for you personally. It's just this whole Cox thing looks really, really strange coming in from a standing start. And Cox isn't really helping, in his reactions. (I honestly did think his posts were sock puppetry making fun of him, so that's kind of a scary place to be coming from...)

I'm gonna sound like a broken record here, but in 210 I criticised your *actions* in light of what I understood your intentions to be. My point was that I think your superfast edit of the MBA WP entry would not redound to either your credit or to MBA's credit as an organisation. Your action in that instance makes it appear that you and MBA are overly-sensitive to criticism, which, if your goal was protection of MBA's reputation or anything similar, would backfire on you.

Xopher @308:

I think of you as such a teddy bear I overlooked it. My bad. Must read more better.

It's appalling what your assumptions are. When we kick in money to help someone, it's usually a gift, not a loan. That said, I'm unaware of the case you talk about, so maybe they really were asking for investors, but there's nothing in what you say here to indicate that that's the case.

An archive of the original call for donations can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20010202135500/http://www.blogger.com/server_fund.pyra. And reading that moves me to fix a minor mistake I made earlier; when I said. "I never saw anything in return for my donations," I'd forgotten that I did indeed get a few stickers, as promised.

Seth, @280:

There's a list of MBA members. Many are approachable to the writers of this blog. Is it SO HARD to ask privately to some of them "What's this MBA - is it for real? And who is this Cox guy, is he legit?" before dumping this stuff all over the place?

Until you posted a link (@294), I hadn't been able to find any such list—and I'd looked. So, I went for my next choice: compare what's being said here to things that I know to be true from personal experience. This is where Mr. Cox (as I said @170) went 0 for 2.

In his response to me (@171), he was supercilious, patronizing, and, well, just plain rude.

Now, if I'd seen the list first, or been approached to join by someone I knew (and I know several people on that list), I'd have a much more favorable opinion of the MBA. In fact, I probably would have been happy to send in my check or give my credit card.

But right now, his response to me leads me to believe that his negotiation skills also leave something to be desired. I don't want my representative at the table to be someone who's that arrogant and contemptuous of others. And if he's hoping to re-start the MBA, shouldn't working with bloggers be a higher priority than fussing about who is "three times better"?

On this thread, it has become clear that Oliver Willis is a member, Rogers Cadenhead actively sought their assistance, and they retain legal counsel in the form of Ron Coleman. Seth Finklestein linked to a Wayback Machine version of their membership page @ 294. Tiny organization, perhaps, representing all the blogs, of course not, but one-man? No.

pericat @ 251: "That analogy's rather far afield of situation here, as it involves your taking on no obligations on behalf of anyone else no matter if other party's statement is true or not. A closer one would be if you were meeting a third party with a view to negotiating use of their land, which your neighbours also wanted to use, and that third party publicly stated that you were speaking on your neighbours' behalf as well as your own."

That's exactly why it's a valid analogy--the only ones claiming that legally binding agreements regarding what is and is not Fair Use is going to result from Cox's meeting is the AP. There's no sign that Cox thinks any such thing. He doesn't seem to think there's going to be anything more to it than a chat about reasonable guidelines. The only binding negotiation he's doing is on behalf of Rogers Cadenhead, whom he really truly actually represents.

Ted @ 252: "I haven't seen a single post from him that suggests that he agrees it was completely ludicrous for the AP to send takedown notices for contextual quotes ranging from 33-79 words."

From this post at mediabloggers. "In June, Rogers got more take down requests, these were not whole text/exact headline entries and 9 of the 10 posts appeared to him to be examples of "fair use"."

Those would be the ones that spurred Rogers to seek legal counsel, and the ones that Robert Cox is meeting the AP to dispute. He seems to be willing to go to the mat over them: "In those cases where we take a hard line because we believe the blogger is in the right we stand our ground until we get a positive outcome for the blogger." This is the reason for the meet: to give AP a chance to settle before the DCMA counter-claim period is over, "just in case we are not able to work something out that satisfies Rogers."

Look--Robert Cox is the one going to the AP telling them they're trampling Fair Use in these cases. Isn't it pretty obvious he thinks they're indefensible assertions?

We've got several intersecting things going on here, and the interaction is not all that healthy. I think--but am not certain--that most of the things were not connected causally.

On reflection, I've taken out a big chunk of comment in the middle here so as not to pot-stir.

In any event, perhaps it's time to let this cool off.

I wonder if you really recognize the wealth of male privilege that seems to seep from your disingenuous attempt to claim there is neither overt nor subtextual sexism in your post.

Oh, and while it may amuse you to claim that you were not noticing the "witch" part -- thank you, but if we are walking behind the elephant and everything suddenly gets dark and stinky we don't normally believe that ConEd just lost a substation.

(and no, I wasn't being protective really of TNH when I committed doggerel, it was more a feeling of leash slipping.... TNH is quite capable of defending herself and there was no call or need for me to do it. It was simply a sparking off point which the verse daemon got creative from.... as it is wont to do on occasion).

She's an editor professionally on her own merits--editors who edit books that don't provide the desired commercial return on investment, wind up pinkslipped.

Making Light originated AFAIK as a for love not money endeavor, and TNH's invention of disemvowelling was absolutely brilliant. The fact that this place is a salon full of long threads etc. that have a certain degree of eclat and elan to them, is because of Teresa, and Patrick, and Jim Macdonald, and the late Mike Ford, and abi....

They aren't fronts/shills for third parties/paid mouths/"product placement" specialists....

Yes, if Cox knows that the AP thinks, or is pretending to think, that he (cox) is somehow empowered to make binding representations on anybody other than himself, and he knows that such an impression is false, I even more don't want any shred of credibility of any claim or impression that he, or is "organization" represents *me.*

Anybody who would willingly perpetrate such a deception, especially in the public sphere, is more to flee from than the simply incompetent.

Jonathan Vos Post always kind of intimidated me. I feel oddly reassured to find that he was just bloviating.

My first comment at Making Light was to point out a mistake he made, so I guess I was never intimidated by him. Entertained, yes.

If *that* is the entire membership roster, I don't see how this organization can make any claims to being representative of the cross-section of the "blogosphere"

And if AP seemingly is "negotiating" with the MBA, in the misunderstanding (perhaps purposeful misunderstanding) that they are dealing with a more inclusive group, someone has been smoking something that will more than likely get one visiting a nice padded room for a while....

I just had to throw away an entire paragraph praising you for one of the best snarks I'd ever seen. When I went to copy/paste the sentence I realized I'd entirely misread it.

What you wrote:
...I have to admit that this thread isn't showing our best side (snort)...

What I mentally read:
...I have to admit that this thread isn't showing our best snide (snort)...

If it's any consolation, I've really appreciated your level headed and thoughtful posts the last couple of days - thanks!

Oh, yes, wrong term. The thing is, it must have taken me all of two hours, when I first discovered s-f fandom & heard people talking about "Conventions", to figure out that the "Committee" consists of the /c/r/a/z/y/ people who plan & organize the convention, and supervise the staff & volunteers during it, whereas the members are just ordinary fans like me. That you mentioned returning to fandom, yet apparently weren't aware of this, seemed ... strange. (I probably should have considered that there are a lot of definitions of "science fiction fan(dom)" floating around.)

About the MBA discussion, all I can say is that most of what's been said in favor of that organization seems to be so much more vague & insubstantial than the discussions I'm accustomed to that I don't know what to think of it, and probably won't until at least after the details of the Negotiations are published.

I had thought that people who just did not like seeing Clinton depicted as a villain were getting upset and seizing on any reason to do so. Now I see that they are reacting to a comparison to "witch," which I learn via Google that Hillary Clinton has been called directly in the past. Mea culpa. I would not do that. Much as I think it would be funny to see Hillary cast as a pop-culture villain—any villain, including the Wicked Witch, the Queen of Hearts, Captain Hook, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, or Darth Vader—I do not think she, or any other woman, deserves to be called a witch.

Apart from that…I've spent the last hour writing and crossing out responses, but you know what? When you're accused of an -ism, anything you say to try to prove you aren't just sounds like lame excuses or justification. So I'll just say that while I dislike Hillary Clinton as a person (just the same as I dislike Bill Clinton), I am satisfied in myself that it is not because she is a woman.

At any rate, I'm convinced it was inadvertent, and that you missed that whole "witch" thing. Hell, it didn't occur to me why women need more iron than men until I was in my 20s. And I like Bill and Hillary both.

The anger at me related to Libby actually originated two months before due to the appearance of a Washington Post story which recounted my experience in obtaining 2 seats in the media room for MBA members. The story appeared a few days after FDL learned that they were getting seats too. What people at FDL did not know was that the court had made the decision to credential bloggers for Libby back in October - not January. The basis for that decision was a presentation I had made to a group of the most senior judges during a conference I attended there as part of the First Amendment Center's "Justice & Journalism" series. I had made similar presentations to other groups of judges at previous conferences without a positive response (I had been aiming for the Moussoui trial in Virginia). In October 2006, my proposal was received positively and they responded by offering to use Libby as a sort of beta test. They asked for a proposal on how it work, I sent it to the court when I got back home after the conference and it was approved a few days later. It was about this time that Alan Sipress of the Washington Post contacted me to do a story about the MBA having nothing to do with Libby. When the seats for Libby were approved I told him and he said he would rather do a story on that and that he thought it might go A1 if it were exclusive to the Washington Post. The story was done in early December and scheduled for Dec. 19, 2006. It kept getting postponed so that it ran a few days before the Libby Trial began but on D1. That story became that basis for many other stories. Thus the timing of the delayed story made it appear that the MBA was credentialed AFTER FDL when in fact we had been credentialed two months earlier. The FDL had no idea I had been meeting with judges at these conferences over the previous two years. They had no idea that at the end of each one I would make a dual pitch to them - if you get a blogger in your courtroom offer them the same privileges and protections you would offer any reporter if they were operating in a journalistic capacity and that the courts ought to be willing to credential bloggers as media for high profile cases. When I attempted to explain this to be people like Jane and Marcy and Pachoutec et al they simply did not want to hear it.

It is very similar to this experience now. I can TELL people what happened and they just don't want to hear it. For example, I have made it quite clear that the MBA does not speak for "all bloggers" or even its own member bloggers. We are an association not a union and therefore have no power to bind even our own members let alone the entire blogosphere. The only exception to that is in a specific instance for a limited purpose like for a Presidential Debate or a U.S. Courthouse where the Secret Service or the U.S. Marshall Service require someone sign a legal document in order to release a credential for event. Another example would be in a case like this one with the AP. In those cases, the MBA does speak for whichever bloggers have agreed to be represented in that particular instance and when the instance ends so does the representation.

I dunno. I'm not sure that last tome was all that levelheaded. I can see Seth's point and I've been responding to the siren call of flamage here, too. (Somebody's wrong on the Internet and it burns with the heat of a thousand suns!)

The MBA seems to be an organization which is really trying to do the right thing, and Robert Cox presumably helps it do that, and that's great. Certainly retaining a lawyer is a fine thing to do, especially in America's litigative corporate atmosphere.

But I agree with TNH's overall judgment here. While Robert Cox may well be an overall force for good, the fact remains that we know he took credit in the past for opening the Libby case to bloggerdom, and that's (and I hate this word) troubling. And face it -- his posts here were weird.

But on the other hand, in this particular shitstorm, I don't think he's actually done anything wrong. He's acting in good faith, he's helping Rogers Cadenhead, and he appears to be trying to get AP to define what the hell they think they're doing. These are all good things.

Now, The AP is going to try to spin this as setting standards for blog usage of their quotes. They're still talking out their ass on that one, and they'll find soon enough that this isn't going to blow over so easily.

So. This is getting good!

When you notice that you are telling people what happened but they just don't want to hear it, you might want to take that as an indicator that you are really not coming across as very sincere at first. Not this last post! That was perfect. If you had posted this earlier, or if this were, say, on your blog or the MBA site in any way, then perhaps this entire thing wouldn't be happening in this extremely awkward way.

I was serious in my post to Seth. If the problem here is that your site is technically out of commission or difficult to work with, I can help you next week. Seriously. Email me if this would help. But it might really help to get some better information posted if you want to avoid this in the future.

Another tip -- don't sweat Wikipedia. If you're doing good work, the karma will win out. People whispering behind your back really don't count, because it will go away.

I will admit to disliking Hillary Clinton, but ... gender doesn't enter into it.

You expect me to believe your second sentence after reading the first one? In what universe is that NOT vicious, sexist, misogynist bullying?

But thanks to PC, I need to watch anything I say or do because there's a chance I might accidentally offend someone in some completely unintended way.

Bingo! "Anti-PC" used as a defense for plain old bad manners; whining about being called on same; FREE SPACE; "It's true I don't like her, but that has nothing to do with her gender"; "Oh, I didn't MEAN it, where's your sense of HUMOR?" Damn, that was easy.

Paula, #277: You're seeing "Hillary" vs. "Obama" because that is how the candidates themselves have chosen to represent their campaigns. I suspect that Sen. Clinton did so specifically to avoid confusion between herself and her husband; I think it was an unfortunate choice, but it was her choice to make. For myself, I have been carefully monitoring my own speech and writing to make sure that I use "Clinton/Obama" rather than "Hillary/Obama", precisely because of the social implications of using a woman's first name and a man's last name.

Noelle, #289: "Make a phone call" was in fact what Cox suggested to one person who found the information on his website inadequate. This led to a good bit of (well-deserved, IMO) derision and eye-rolling. CB @9 put it well: For more information about his blog, you should CALL HIM. Because that's how bloggers trade information - via long-distance telephone call.

abi, #303: Carefully including the information that she may frequently be found walking between her home and workplace/classes. Translation: "Easy target for kidnapping and rape! Oh, and if you need more info, contact me by e-mail." If anything nasty does happen to his target, I certainly hope that possible connections to Cox are thoroughly investigated.

Xopher, #309: I don't enjoy watching people who, if I knew them for real, I'd be sorely tempted to push in front of a bus. It's just not funny to me.

Hear, hear! I also hate having them as protagonists in a book, and will generally stop reading after a few chapters.

If it's technically challenging, email me. I'll do it for you. But seriously, if you want to look good not only to The AP and your judge contacts and stuff, but also to the people who count (that would be us), this would be a great first step.

And really, wouldn't it make you feel better? You know it's the right thing to do.

Allow me now to quote, ironically, Kos: "But anyone with an inkling of understanding of the law and principles at stake would know that the AP has no ground to stand on, and anything negotiated between them and the MBA will be ignored by the vast majority of bloggers anyway."

In other words: AP can enjoy their mythical la-la land all they want, but nothing legally binding will ever result from it, no matter how hard they close their eyes and wish. Even if they had Robert Cox wishing right along with them, it still wouldn't matter.

So why are you so intent on making this seem like a big deal? At worst, this is a media ploy on AP's part to make it look like they are cooperating with bloggers now so that they can shake their heads sadly later on when bloggers start breaking whatever "guidelines" they make up (as per Michael Roberts' #233). But legally, there's no there there. It would certainly make Robert Cox an asshole worthy of considerable derision if he were consciously playing along with AP's game plan, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. He set up the meet with AP for the entirely respectable and legitimate purpose of working out a non-legal settlement regarding Mr. Cadenhead's dispute with the AP--the idea that the meet is primarily about setting blogger guidelines is a fiction of the AP's creation that Cox has repeatedly denied.

If what you're worried about is this meeting somehow resulting in binding guidelines for bloggers, you can rest easy.

Ayse @ 261: "So what matters is who has more credibility. Since the MBA manages to come off as an insurance scam based on their web site, AP's version of the story seems more credible to me. If it's not the truth, MBA should have a big front-page article disclaiming it, because obviously somebody at AP has miusunderstood. I'm always suspicious of entities that are willing to let misunderstandings of that scope stand uncontested."

"Uncontested?" How is posting a clarifying post on the mediabloggers website, and then devoting considerable time (and 3,500+ words) to clarifying the misunderstanding on this very thread leaving the assertion "uncontested?" Is he not protesting enough for you? What, at this point, would reassure you of his sincerity?

And the AP is suddenly credible in this mess? It's the AP that wants to charge bloggers $2.50 per word, not the MBA! In case you forgot, the whole case against the MBA is that they're allegedly working as AP's stooges. If Mortiarty pointed at his butler and said "He's been helping me all along!" and the butler protested, who would you believe, the known criminal or the alleged accomplice? The AP has a lot of reasons to lie to make it seem as if they have blogger allies. But let's remember who our real enemies are.

(Which is Ponce, Puerto Rico if anybody feels the need to stalk me. I'm go walking alone on the beach, too -- well, with my dog, but I don't think she'd be much help. So if anybody wanted to, you know, persuade me to be more respectful of my betters or something, that would be the opportunity to take. Just go to La Guancha, most days in the late afternoon, I'm the guy with the beard and ponytail in the Panama hat with a Jack Russell terrier.)

i am interested in seeing the "membership list" of "mba" so that i can avoid participating in the idiocy even indirectly. i hope ML publishes it when it becomes available as i am constitutionally incapable of linking through to louche sites.

Something doesn't add up about the whole MBA operation, and you're missing some substantial pachyderms wandering your premises.

1: Robert Cox is starting to look like a serial liar. TNH might still be wrong in her analysis, but the accumulation of evidence and the man actual behaviour here fit the hypothesis.

2: Given what you say you pay as a member, I can't make the finances add up in a sensible way. I've run a business. I've got some idea of what the costs of just existing are. Add in trips to New York, phone calls to lawyers who will work pro bono, web hosting,... It's not a bad thing for the MBA to be getting some of its income from a commission on the insurance it sells--the NFU does that, but I don't need to be a member to buy insurance from them.

(Small aside: no, I don't think the insurance element is a scam, but who underwrites it. Insurance companies generally offer a lot of legal liability cover for a very small charge, often as a routine part of other policies. It's because few ordinary people see the inside of a court. If Robert Cos is right, blogging is a high-risk activity. Either somebody is willing to lose money on bloggers, or...)

3: Robert Cos seems to have had a long relationship with the AP, feeding them quotable statements on blogging backed by his position and the name of the organisation. It looks impressive, and his particular Potemkin Village hasn't been particularly harmful.

Until now.

He's presenting the AP with a story of a media blogger's organisation, one with a long history and established image, taking part in the process which makes the rules AP will use of blog quoting of their stories. He's risking giving AP's policies a false credibility.

It would be rhetorical exaggerration to claim he's selling them the rope they'll use to hang us. but I'm a cynical bastard who's seen this scenario before.

And finally...

4: You think this thread is a "hate-storm"? Not even close. We haven't even started singing The Internationale yet, never mind raising the barricades. (Yes, I do know where the traditional agricultural implements are stored.)

I just realized that it looks like all the links to members on the MBA membership page all point to archive.org pages.

Now, I can see that it might be easier to have such than maintain live links, bur it still seems ... odd

Many of us are sensitive to the markers of egoboo overindulgence. It starts with name-dropping and the uncasual explanation of the context of anecdotes (lest anyone miss that their wider importance). I do it too; I was insufferable for at least half an hour after I got BoingBoinged†. The darker side of addiction is when you stop doing and start talking about doing whatever you're famous for. The much-interviewed author who hasn't written a book in ages. The actor who only does voiceovers for commercials, but still lives the Hollywood lifestyle.

Granted, on the evidence, Robert Cox may be an egoboo addict. He talks about blogging to important people, and to us about the important people he talks to. But he doesn't blog. His community management skills are crude enough that he outs commenters he doesn't agree with‡.

But the internet is large, and contains multitudes. Different people can help in different ways, even people we don't like or approve of. The main questions to ask in this situation are what is he doing? is it helpful? if not how can it be made more helpful?

It's indisputable that intervening on the behalf of the Drudge Retort, at Rogers Cadenhead's request, is helpful. Whatever the source of his access, Cox can get the attention of AP enough to discuss the matter with them. And listening to AP's wishlist for blogger interaction isn't a bad thing; listening is important. Getting people's positions is important. It tells us what we have to negotiate with.

My concern comes from the interview Liza linked to. On the one hand, he has said above in this thread that the MBA does not speak for "all bloggers" or even its own member bloggers. But on the other hand...

Robert Cox: I also told him - and this has not been reported at all - that it would have been better if AP's lawyers had called the MBA first
Robert Cox: this is a very standard pitch I make to all litigants [against] bloggers
Ms. Liza Sabater: especially if they already had a relationship with MBA
Robert Cox: it is why I speak to bar association
Robert Cox: I would like lawyers to know that the MBA can be a way to reach out to bloggers without going nuclear out of the box
Robert Cox: we may not solve every problem
Robert Cox: or know every blogger
Robert Cox: but we have a good network and in many cases we will know someone who knows the bloggers...

In other words, Cox wants the MBA to interface between AP and bloggers, even if it doesn't "represent" bloggers. Not just bloggers who are its members, but ones they can network to. I have a few problems with this.

First of all, it means that the MBA's perceptions of the matter will shape the interaction. This can be useful if they are accurate, but as we have all seen, misperceptions happen on the internet. I think, reading Cox's writings online, that he might let his strongly held political beliefs get in the way of a fair perception of some bloggers. I'd prefer a slightly less politically one-sided intermediary, personally.

Secondly, this gives AP the idea that it doesn't have to figure out how to deal with individual bloggers, because the MBA is some kind of ombudsman. That's just wrong. The AP should go direct to the blogger in question, who can then choose whom to pull in for assistance. Anything else is infantilizing.

Third of all, it blurs the lines of accountability and trust. If I got an email from the MBA saying the AP had a problem with me, I'd think the MBA was representing AP in the matter, not me. Like mafia insurance, it feels wrong.

And last of all, it creates a hierarchy where one is not only unnecessary, but actively bad. I don't want to play Six Degrees of Robert Cox on the internet, trying to be on the line that divides the people who get a friendly email from the ones who get a lawyer letter. I don't want to wonder what would cause me to end up on the other side of that line.

What the AP needs to do is to get to grips with the notion of fair use. Any intervention that helps that—on The Drudge Retort's behalf, or anyone else's—is great. Anything that doesn't, like trying to broaden the MBA's interaction from a case by case matter where they are called in by the blogger to any form of procedural or official role at all is not a good idea.

I am very interested in seeing the report of the meeting. When can we expect it?

-----
* That was irony, in case you're wondering
† And there I go again. See?
‡ This is a big red flag for me, but I'm trying to see beyond it.

You've articulated the two primary concerns I have with the situation while dodging the red herrings.

The psychosphere operates off perceptions, opinions, and precedents--e.g. it turns out that the "precedent" for the treatment of corporations as if they were individual persons, is a legal ruling that got misinterpreted!!! (Unfortunately, while on my home computer I think there is a link to that buried somewhere among tends of thousands of emails, that machine is not where I am, and finding it could be a needle in huge haystacks issue.) However, the legal precedent got set with the misinterpretation and is long established with case after case after case....

It's sort of like the situation with someone encroaching on your property, if you don't do something effective to fight it over time you LOSE the property....

Or another example--note the amount of attention the Commercial "News" media paid to Rep. Kuchinich and THIRTY FIVE articles of each impeachment, any one of which is a serious charge and if true involve at a minimum gross negligence, with some of the charges ranging up to capital crimes. The commercial media is acting like nothing has happened, not even providing comments of "get along, nothing to see here."

The AP is part of that malfeasance and collusion to obstruct justice, and return accountability and oversight and the rule of las to an Executive Branch with an imperial monarcharical mindset and politics.

The AP is busily assisting in marginalizing bloggers and disempowering and disenfranchising.

Remember Mr Guckert/"Gannon" ? He dropped out of sight from the commercial news media faster and more effectively than ice cream in a Worldcon consuite--he went from apparently being the most-favored alleged journalist in the White House Press Corps, to vanishing without a trace, let alone commercial media attention to the story and questioning of just how was it that in effect a the proprietary of an interstate pimping service over the Internet for male homosexuals with a taste for military trappings, became the favorite person for POTUS to talk during during the infrequent (and when has there been one this year?!) semi-public meetings between POTUS and the press corp.

The relevance of Mr Gannon/Guckert is that his is but one of the more egregious news media scandals, which the commercial media except maybe for Jay Leno, who does some satire in some of his humor (and besides, he's from Massachusetts.....) pretended never existed, never investigated, and prevented from public attention and alarm....

Getting back to the AP and bloggers--cut off effective access to reporting information--no quoting allowed without towing the line of fawning on AP and fawning on the people it doesn't report on negatives, no using AP information as a source--can't paraphrase/rewrite under AP's terms, and there must be payment.

The evil genius of the appartchiks and their meisters the past seven and a half years in the Executive Branch, and for half a generation in Congress, and on the Supreme Court, is the blocking of information, information tampering, and redirection of all inquiry to dead letter offices, bureaucratic roadblocks, closed offices with no forward addresses, and Presidential Decrees, while any original data gets permanently shitcanned (as in all those obliterated emails). Thus, there is no audit trail, and those who require adamant megatonnnage of incontrovertible evidence, get to say, "see, there's nothing there! It's a conspiracy theory! You're making all this up!" and blithely go on being tools, willingly or by consequence, to the Star Chamber.

Put in that sort of sinister light it can look like the MBA is a tool the AP can wield, either with Mr Cox as collaborator or dupe (note the new book out by the former Administration mouthpiece, note Mr Brock with his book Blinded by the Right published years ago--men who willingly colluded with evil and only much later started realizing what incredibly duped total chumps and public enemies they had allowed themselves to become).

The AP appears to be doing maneuvering, and MBA, with webpages that a competent 12 year old would be deathly embarrassed to be associated with for their lack of updating and broken links, is participating in what looks rather like the Southern Baptist Convention Mission to the World Trade Center district--an oppportunistic expedition for benefit of the powermongers in the organization and their benefit, rather than the best interests of the assisted and the general public when the interests of the assisted and the general public don't coincide with the true purposes of the expeditionary forces' leadership.

Addendum

Once upon a time I was in the Boston Computer Society, which was a non-profit institution, and saw some of the destruction of that organization. The Board of Directors had a cabal that basically destroyed the institution. There was no oversight to allow impeachment/removal of anyone from the Board, and the Board was holding secret meetings which were not legal--but held them anyway, made decisions that members couldn't get information about, and I forget what other misdeeds were involved. It's not clear how much was culture clash, how much may have been actual criminal intent, how much was arrogance, how much was incompetence, how much was power for the sake of power, etc., the only surety in the situation, is that the organization went into dissolution and out of existence.

I don't think anyone really actually wanted to destroy the Boston Computer Society, but the acts of the Board of Directors certainly did have that effect... and the other 20,000 or so people who were or had been members, had had NO power to prevent it, there was no way to remove any of the members of the Board who were seen as being among the worst effects of the cascading disaster (the organization was in trouble and it was apparent to quite a few of the Activists (volunteers) that there were problems which were looking more and more dire and promising to destroy the organization... the BoD however wasn't willing to do anything to try to avoid the predictable collapse (the most obvious predictor was the financial state which was monotonically dropping and the financial resources were falling more and more and more....).

What this has to do with MBA--the BoD of BCS and the members, didn't have the same interests. The members didn't want the organization to shutdown, but the BoD had their OWN agenda, and destroyed the organization.... MBA may have reasonable members, are the people who control it reasonable, and do they really have the members' and general public/blogosphere interests at heart, and not their own particular intentions and perceptions and ways of doing things, as did the BCS Board of Directors?

If you are a blogger you really need to read the EFF's Blogger's Rights information. It would be the first place I would have referred Rogers Cadenhead to in his situation. For bonus karma, if you believe in what the EFF is doing and believe they are effective: DONATE!

They claim to have a large membership, yet charge no dues and have an office in a building in which rents are, well, pricey. There are maybe half a dozen people who claim to be leaders of the group ... but no one else has any information on them, they don't seem to ever hold public meetings, and there's no other information available but their own PR.

Quite a few people - me included - think it's a front group for someone.

The Time Patrol?

I shouldn't post a comment to a blog without consulting a lawyer first?

Otherwise, what Michael Roberts said.

Nobody reads comments (sigh, that last sentence is in conversation English which includes slight hyperbole and is not meant to be read as a strictly literal statement because it is obviously then self-refuting).

Then what's your point, Mr. Comment 268?

There's a difference between "criticism" and "hatchet-job".

Then goes on to define the difference as, whatever he points to when he says "hatchet-job."

Liza @ 295: I haven't seen the proprietors standing in a line waiting to sign the AP's praises over any of this.

That's a great word. heh.

Yes! That was exactly my thought -- the sort of person who is so desperate for egoboo that they aggrandize their position in fairly minor organizations (no insult to the SFWA, but in the great scheme of things it is fairly minor.)

In Cox's case, it seems to come complete with extreme creepiness, though; Burt may have been self-important, but he wasn't *mean*. Certainly not a stalker.

only on certain indeterminate values of Bob Cox ranging over all possible configurations of Bob Cox.

As I understand it, it is the job of the courts to project Mr. Cox onto the eigenstates that represent the configurations the law recognizes.

That reminds me of 2006's gubernatorial race in California, during which the Comedy Channel Ronnie Cox and Mark Singer try to project the results of the elections.

So what are the eigenvectors, and are you trying to invoke JvP?

So Rogers has a post up, AP issued a statement and I've got my own post up in which I pretty much cover everything I could think to say about this including my response to this
post.

http://tinyurl.com/6pj9mr

It seems like there are a few folks here who actually want to be fair-minded and so I hope at least they will read it. I think if Theresa is fair-minded she would not have a post up that says the MBA is a "sham" because while she might not like me or certain things I've written the MBA is quite real and doing real things.

I think you ought to learn how to spell Teresa's name. It's right above the comment box.

I have been working very hard on this case while also trying to complete a deliverable for a client on Monday and getting very little sleep in the process. I also happen to be a lousy typist. There are going to be a LOT of typos. But thanks for the suggestion anyway.

I am wading through the material on the webpage you posted the link to, and have read the related material at http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3372/ap-settles-dispute-drudge-retort

On the positive side, I see "superseded" spelled correctly. But, what is a "lede"? I've never seen the term before, I've seen "lead," but can not recalled ever having seen "lede" used to refer to the start of an article before.

I do not see how "Rogers is refusing to bail [AP] out by publishing the guidance they gave him last night."

The material from Rogers Cadenhead at

http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3372/ap-settles-dispute-drudge-retort

includes, I spent around two hours yesterday talking to AP attorneys about their specific objections... I won't reveal the details of this discussion until AP releases the guidelines for bloggers that it promised on Monday.

That's not exactly "refusing to bail out... by publishing." (actually, "refuse to bail them out by publishing...." is an ambiguous sentence, which can be read in two contradictory ways, and I can't tell which the intent of the sentence is!)

He acceded to terms negotiated with AP; this provided a precedent for one particular blogger having negotiated an agreement, but it should have been made amply clear by the responses here, that whatever accommodation has occurred in that particular case, fails the criterion of more general public accession. Until there is publication of the agreement, no one not privy to the terms, has the opportunity to have an informed opinion on whether AP is a bully, a victim, a business protecting its intellectual property in a "reasonable" fashion, or an encroach monopolizing amoeboid scunge fungus, out to liquify and ingest the brains of the non-assimilated in the blogosphere.

[Note, someone died in recent weeks from amoeboid scunge dissolving his brain. Yeah, -eeeuuuuuwwww!-]

Be glad you're not in LA this week. 80F at 6 in the morning tells you more than you want to know about the weather the rest of the day.

I hate "lede" for "lead"; I looked in the OED for lede to find out if I was wrong, and it has a long history (about 1000 years) meaning people, race; subjects, vassals, countrymen.

Per something called "Wordnet" put out by Princeton University, by way of dictionary.com, it is currently used as a synonym for "lead"

I hate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lede_(news)#Terms_and_structure

"Although some would spell the word as lede others maintain that the beginning text should be described with the word lead." (The article uses either "lede" or "lede/lead" from then on.)

I suspect it started out as "lede" but somewhere along the way people who didn't know the correct spelling started writing it down as its homonym, "lead."

BCS was founded by Jonathan Rotenberg, was it, when he was a teenager. It was an idea whose time had come, and he was the person who was at the forefront in creating a grass roots computer user group in eastern Massachusetts. It snowballed, and included everyone from Clueless Wonder Newbie computer users, to veteran made--fortune-in-computer-industry entrepeneurs and software developers.

However, since he was not sophisticated regarding organizational structure, etc., there were fatal flaws in the construction of the organization--the issue about no way to remove members of the Board of Directors was one the main examples.

Disclaimer, the material below is from memory, and is to the best of my recollection, and may contain errors.
======================================
There was a rumor that one of the alleged ways that BCS got into trouble that was unrelated to the BoD, was that Mr Rotenberg had ticked off Apple royally--that Apple had had been being quite generous to BCS, until he insulted a female Apple executive who was pregnant saying something to her that was something like "shut up and go away until you aren't under the influence of [regnancy] hormones." That was many months before things were getting terminal with BCS, but the organization was already having negative cash flow problems.

The point about that alleged incident, was that at the time Jonathan Rotenberg and BCS were so closely tied together, that when Rotenberg insulted and demeaned the Apple executive, it harmed the entire organization and continued to harm the entire organization.

The too-close ties between a supposedly for public benefit organization and a single individual heading up the organization, can be harmful to both of them.... BCS just might have survived either a head who permanently alienated major previous benefactors, OR a rogue Board of Directors, it couldn't and didn't survive the depredations of both.

The relevance of this to MBA is that the identity of the organization with Mr Cox, in my opinion, is an extremely bad thing--it goes both ways, that perceptions of offensiveness/obnoxiousness on the part of one, get perceived as offensiveness/obnoxiousness on the part of the other.

For a private for profit corporation, a sole proprietorship, Baen Books before Jim Baen's death, etc., that's one thing--there are in the case of Baen Books lots of other book publishers around, and private individuals acting on their own behalf or on behalf of the private businesses they own, or what private businesses do that reflect (sometimes even cause jailing of...) the owners, tend to have the damage limited to the individuals and businesses [yes, the customers and employees and suppliers CAN have financial troubles from it and sometimes even get hit with collaterally damaging lawsuits, but usually when a small business owner ticks off people it doesn't much hurt third parties]. For someone to be too identified with a supposed large-numbers-of people public service-oriented organization, too close identification can be devastating psychologically to the person (e.g, if the person gets booted, or if the organization blows up...) or can be deadly to the organization (Boston Computer Society demise), and harms the general members of the organization in the fallout, and the public interest.

Movable Type is pretty inflexible about links and tags, as a rule. It's a pain.

But, what is a "lede"? I've never seen the term before, I've seen "lead," but can not recalled ever having seen "lede" used to refer to the start of an article before.

It's common journalist jargon. For other examples, see Language Log: Hed, dek, lede, graf, tk: live with it and Journalism Slang - How to Talk Like a Reporter.

But then, I don't have a high regard for the level of literacy of a lot of journalists and their [lack of, or lack of competent...] research ability/interest. I have rants about their usages of such terms as "video" and "codec"....

Did he write his own date routines as well?

As in, u 2 cn d3bas3 d3 languag3?

BLEECCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

No, he eventually came out of the closet and before that back in those days it was a lot dicier for someone to be openly homosexual and go dating other fellows. I have no idea if he found a partner and married him or not after the Massachusetts court system declared the state constitution and a lawsuit mandated allowing homosexual marriage.

That's not what I meant. I meant date routines in a computer programming sense. The ones that tell you things like whether it's a leap year or not.

In other words, this story is an object lesson in the value of design patterns. So are hand-carved date routines.

Any thoughts about how they arrived at that conclusion?

I don't remember when that was, except that it was in the late 1980s early 1990s time frame, because there was a program item about it at a Boskone that was in Springfield, MA (late 1980s, early 1990s).

Anyway, EFF was founded for good reasons, and even though it was around before contemporary weblogging evolved to what its current state of being, I have a much greater awareness of EFF. and, going to http://www.eff.org as a kneejerk reaction/thought to "what would I expect EFF's URL to be?" find a CURRENT webpage, with articles dated as recently at June 20, 2008 on it, links to who the staff are, etc.

(The context I usually see it in is 'burying the lede', if that helps any.)

Re: lede

I've been seeing it about the web more and more over the last year or so. I first noticed the resurgence on Wikipedia, but it seems to have spread like a rash.

As PJ Evans says, I think it's been taken on as argot, intended to add local color to journalist-style blogging.

I got the unenviable task of having to test software that had to deal with graphical and quantitative anlysis of comparison of power consumption comparing days and weeks of differing numbers of hours, due to WOY#O$###*&%^# daylight savings time,with the 23 hour spring forward (ptui... I am NOT a morning person!) day and the 25 hour fall back day. (Initially the sofware response was "I think I will crash now.")

For that matter, I recently had to test the correctness of developer implemented routines switching between various flavors of time encoding, between big endian and little endian byte ordering....

Yuck. (The conversion went through several iterations of developer recoding before working properly.....) (And don't get me started on rollover of 24 hour clocks, I have impolite things to say that include snarling about IBM 7090 Serial #1, on -that- regard!)

I suggest you go back and re-read that because if you do you will see quite clearly that SHE OUTED HERSELF, providing her name, her school/address and her email address. The entire matter was a function of her posting disgusting and malicious information about me, my wife and my children on several web sites and discussion groups. I asked her nicely and repeatedly to stop but she refused. I told her if she did not stop I would respond by asking my web hosting provider to find out who she was and associating her anonymous postings with her real name. Her response was to provide her own name and other identifying information and dare me to do what I had said I would do. So I did. I would do it again. The woman was the most disgusting, foul-mouthed, hateful troll I've ever encountered in 20+ years online so do me a favor and don't try to attack me by defending a woman like that who responded to my stupid Olbermann web site by posting disgusting, sexually-laced diatribes about my wife and children. OK?

Take the lead in de-leding the lede. DO NOT take me to your Lede, I am NOT interested in that sort of swan song, I saw five of them already today (two adults and three cygnets; I wonder how many of them will survive the summer. Last year the pair of swans had one that survived, it was snapping turtles 7, cygnets 1 last year).

Hand-carved date routines aren't my dearest thing either. I spent eight months in 1998 preliving* the five dates most affected by the turn of the millennium. We rooted them out of our systems like a cancer, careful to get every tentacle and branch.

(After that extended live-action version of Groundhog Day, I did at least get my own Indecent Proposal, when they paid me rather a lot of money for a single night of my time. Of course, "rather a lot" was four figures rather than seven, but all I had to do was sit in the office and be ready to handle a disaster. None happened, because we'd got all the tentacles in time. We played a turkey shoot game on our PC's.)

-----
* It's like reliving, but you do it beforehand, over and over again.

Ah, yes, the "temporary" patch....

IUS originally was Interim Upper Stage, which then became Inertial Upper Stage.

IGES started off at Initial Graphical Exchagne Standard. Alas, the damned personal computer industry except for Commodore-Amiga, didn't believe in the concept of Open Standards... is there YET an open standards generally used drawing file format in use in personal computers that is cross-platform and cross-application?!

And last, but not least... then-Brigidier General Forrest McCartney was in as uncalm a tone as he was ever wont to use (he shredded a contractor into a steaming pile of raw hamburger on the carpet in a polite, calm tone of voice....) was demanding to know what there were still problems with traveling wave tube amplifiers which hadn't been solved, that the components were problems back when he was a much younger military officer... A member of the technical staff of The Aerospace Corporatio dug up an old memo, which stated that traveling wave tube amplifiers would stop being problems in the future and didn't need more development funding for improvement programs, because they were going to be superseded by solid state microcircuits--the author and signer of the document was one Major Forrest McCartney. Oops....

Every speciality has its own version. I write BAR, q12h or BID, IV, PO or IM, TLC, and other shorthand items. When you have to write the same things over and over again, you develop a faster or more succinct method. YMMV, IMHO.

And when you have to sign everything you write, your signature changes from readable to a scrawl, or perhaps a lovely hieroglyph.

There are some published computer/electronics industry articles which I wrote, three that thave my name on them, a few press releases I wrote, etc. Again, before today I can't ever recall having seen "lede" as synonym for "lead," on the other hand, I was never dealing with people doing lead typesetting, either.... (I did see the proportionally spaced typesetting system at MITRE, and GTE Governments Systems had its own high speed Xerox systems in-house at various facilities for document production to deliver however many required copies of publications were involved to the US Government on various contracts, and to print for in-house use...).

There are terms/jargon I use with people I work with, that I don't use in discussions with people outside that context.... or, there is the example of what a "blouse" was in military uniform terms when I was in the Air Force, hint, men tended to wearing blouses when in going out in public wearing uniforms and being speakers.... but they didn't call them blouses in public! The normal public term would be "suit jacket." Call it a "blouse' to a civilian and there could be some misunderstandings....

The majority of the links off of that page are dead now. So I have no way of seeing what she posted about you.

SHE OUTED HERSELF, providing her name, her school/address and her email address.

I see that on the thread—after you provided her physical description, location, make of vehicle, and enough information on her activities that anyone interested in doing so could track her down.

I'll tell you which bundle of information I would be less interested in seeing online.

don't try to attack me by defending a woman like that

This isn't a defense of her; I know nothing about her whatsoever apart from what is posted on that thread. This is about you, and what this incident shows us about you as a blogger. It's about your judgement. I don't give a toss what got you into the situation, but I am not impressed by what you did while you were there.

The kindest thing I can say about it is that you were obviously too angry to think clearly. But, no matter what the excuse, it was not appropriate.

That's positive thinking for ya.

Yes, I lucked out. We had an absolutely brilliant politician at the head of our testing organisation. He saw the Y2K problem early and designed an intelligent program to tackle it in plenty of time.

He then kept the interest of upper management with very good results reporting throughout. Periodically, he would send them a memo explaining what, precisely, the systems would have been doing on each of the key dates had we not done the most recent tranche of testing and fixing.

Our management not only did not begrudge the Y2K effort; they also threw the technology division a stupendous party to thank us for getting the company through it. Shovelling money at the cutover team was the least of it.

I have fond memories of Y2K. I enjoyed the cameraderie. And it got me into software testing, which has proven a fruitful and fulfilling use of my talent for breaking everything around me.

"Any thoughts about how they arrived at THAT conclusion?" she said with a devilish sneer.

Why on earth would I be responsible for what Nina Totenberg thinks or says? Sheesh. I mean, really. The people in the mainstream media are constantly making errors and I am responsible when they do? Hasn't anyone here had that experience where YOU know exactly what happened but when the reporter writes the story it comes out way wrong?

I am not sure why this is complicated but let me try this again.

The U.S.