Bill O'Reilly Sics "His People" on the News Hounds
Reported by Melanie - March 3, 2005
Yesterday, we News Hounds and our webmaster, Jim Gilliam, were contacted by "Creators Syndicate" who represent Bill O'Reilly's syndicated column. Creators Syndicate was understandably upset that News Hound Marie Therese copied a full O'Reilly column and used it in a post dated March 1, 2005. (Bill O'Reilly vs Buster the Bunny.)
Marie Therese, understandably aghast at the mistake she'd made, immediately amended her post by deleting the copy of O'Reilly's column, linking to it instead. This morning, Creators Syndicate contacted us again. Now they insist that we remove the link too!
Everyone knows that millions of articles are linked to every day. It's done all the time. There has even been a court ruling on the legality of the use of links: Internet Ruling: Hypertext Linking does not violate Copyright. (Darn those "activist judges"!)
What's the matter Bill? Are you using your "people" to intimidate and harass the News Hounds? Is this happening through Bill O'Reilly's "people" at the behest of Fox News? Is big, bad Bill O'Reilly afraid of the seven of us?
We'll keep you posted.
UPDATE, 4:27 p.m. ET: We're not going to take the link down.
(Many thanks to Lawrence Lessig and Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society for their help.)
