The Associated Press has dropped a load of bricks on the Drudge Retort (not to be confused with the Drudge Report, i.e. the site people read) for copyright violation. AP, formally a nonprofit cooperative owned by its subscribers, is unhappy seeing its work boosted by freebooting bloggers.

While it’s hard to get excited over the theft of bland news reports nobody wants to read by a website read by nobody, Bernard Warner takes up the cudgels with manful determination:

To understand where the AP is coming from with this caveman approach to copyright enforcement, you have to understand what it’s like to work for a news wire. When I joined Reuters in 2001, nobody prepared me for the level of theft I would witness daily. Newspapers regularly carved up my stories and those of my colleagues and claimed them as their own. Often they’d plug in a word at the bottom indicating it came from Reuters or they would include some vague reference to “wire reports.” But just as often they would not. And, I’m not talking about pipsqueak newspapers. I’m talking about the biggest news outlets in the world blithely copying and pasting my original reportage and making just a few cosmetic changes — typically, removing the “By Bernhard Warner” part and inserting their own name; another trick was keeping my name in and describing me as a “special correspondent” of the newspaper – and hoping I wouldn’t notice. I’m not naming names because the list is simply too long. It seemed to be every newspaper. Out of sheer frustration, my colleagues and I gave up trying to police the theft because we were always hit with the same incredulous response from a newspaper editor: “But you’re a news wire. I’m fairly certain we have a contract with you that says this is fair use.”

Of course, this thievery runs both ways. I’ve seen overseas newspapers steal, wholesale, cricket coverage from Caribbean bloggers and post it as a “Report from our Special Correspondent.” You know how much it costs to send sportswriters to the West Indies? The rum bill alone is sobering. On the other hand, community newspapers are reliably overwhelmed with free content from marketing types (breaking news from the Fleischmann’s Yeast Newsroom!) who are begging editors to steal their stuff. The solution, one supposes, is to lard up real news with Paul Harvey-style in medias res product placements.

Copyright law is important because property rights matter (and because it is the most important thing in the known universe that writers get paid for their work!) but I’m increasingly persuaded by Mike Godwin’s (of “Godwin’s Law” and Wikipedia fame) argument that copyright is essentially moribund, and that at some point the law has to recognize actual practice (except for drugs, prostitution, gambling, taxes, insider trading, and tearing those tags off your mattress). Your more amoral economists might argue that remorseless appropriation of AP content is a sign that the price of the content is too high, and I know a roomful of editors and publishers who would agree.