Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Oh, the blogs!


Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach, the self-proclaimed "People's Watchdog" - who, actually, watches the people's money but is not a dog - is an Internet savvy, Twitter friendly, blogging man.

His tweets are updated more frequently than his blog, and they contain useful information such as the context-free musing "Context does matter."

His blog is basically a series of cut-and-paste jobs of articles from media, which he or his handlers have posted in their entirety.

And that is against copyright law.

But I won't tell him if you don't.

HINT TO CUT-AND-PASTERS: If you use a couple of lines from a story and link to it, you can use the "fair use" defense, which is basically screaming "FAIR USE!" after you get sued and then the court says it's OK because what happens - the news - cannot be copyrighted. But writing is copyrighted, and that's why you really shouldn't copy and paste entire works.

If you are a lawyer, please correct me if I'm wrong, so I can tell you that you're crazy.

Obviously, we're not going to sue the Ulster County Comptroller just because yours truly decided to be snarky. After all, I got more important things to do.

Like reading Auerbach's Tweets.