Right on the Left Coast quotes from the Washington Examiner about the government’s working paper on the “reinvention of journalism.”

Apparently the working paper thinks that the newspapers have a right to the news they report:

Copyright protects an author’s articulation of facts, but not the facts themselves.

State law versions of the “hot news” doctrine, however, can protect a news
organization’s investment in fact gathering to a limited extent. In International News
Service (INS), the AP challenged the use of its news wire stories by INS, which
immediately rewrote the stories and distributed them to its own clients. Based on
common law misappropriation principles, the Supreme Court recognized a “quasi
property” right of very short duration in the facts that were gathered, digested, and
disseminated at great expense by the AP.

Would anyone be talking about this if there weren’t a move to federalize the press? I don’t think so.

Would the government recognize a blogger’s right to the news? Probably not. And, according to some, the bloggers wouldn’t be protected.

God help us that we are giving away our freedoms to a government which wants to run it all. (That’s totalitarianism, in case you weren’t thinking.)