Update on The Misuse of my DU post by the WSJ!

[saracat]

They continue to misue my post in the WSJ.And now they mock others as well. This is from August 31st. Taranto Column, The Best of the Web.
Editorial Opinion Page, The Wall Street Journal

Digging the Dirt
The worms at DemocraticUnderground.com are disheartened to learn that moles also dwell beneath the surface. Someone pointed out to them our item yesterday in which we quoted a post from one "saracat" of Phoenix about his/her/its discovery, during an attempted voter-canvassing drive, that many Democrats plan to vote for President Bush. Saracat is upset:

OMG! Can they do that without my permission? I thought it would be "safe" to recount my experience on a Dem Board. I don't think it is right to use my experience, which I posted in an effort to gain knowledge, against the Campaign. Can I protest this misuse of my statement? Anybody know? Moderators? I have been high jacked!

Another user points out that our quoting of the original post is protected by the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Then "demwing2" weighs in with an effort to buck up saracat:

When I sold door to door, we had an adage that only 1 in 10 would buy. When I got 9 doors slammed in my face I was at my happiest, because I knew I was set for a sale. If I had 18 slams, I knew that I had two sales on the way. It's averages, always averages.

By this standard, the Kerry campaign will have succeeded if it manages to exceed 10% of the popular vote. We've never been bullish on Kerry, but even we think he'll do at least that well.

This Just In

[HarveyBriggs]

1. Your statement is public.

You give up your rights the moment you hit the send button.

You may have a copyright to it, but people have a right to quote from it and to criticise it.

Harvey Briggs

[AP]

5. In broad terms, you can't use copyright to stifle public debate.

[saracat]

11. I am aware of that.I just want to illustrate the point

that you should be careful of what you post> It may be used against your interest.

[AP]

17. I agree. Or, I should say, I agree that you should be conscious of HOW

you write.

I imagine that you could have written a post about your experiences incorporating all the same facts, and telling no lies, which Tarranto never would have used.

You could have written a post about how sad it is that this soldier feels the way he feels and you could have described your exchange and you could have identified weaknessess in the soldier's argument.

I have had conservations with RW'ers which didn't change their minds but, for others, provided valuable insight into how they think about politics.

[saracat]

9. I didn't write enough to have a claim.You need at

least two paragraphs, but that isn't the point.Watch what you post is the point!I am merely illustrating this point for those who are opposed to self censorship!

[A_Possum]

19. Just a clarification about Fair Use

I realize this wasn't your point, saracat, but just for general info,
there is NO set amount of words or paragraphs that constitutes what is Fair Use and what isn't Fair Use. If you copy 2 lines of a haiku, you may be in violation of copyright, and if you copy an entire chapter of a factual record book, you may not be in violation.

Fair Use Provisions:

Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

...In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -

(1)

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2)

the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3)

the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4)

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors

[saracat]

22. Thank you

Of course. They will probably now publish this thread and you will be quoted as well! Lol!

[AP]

20. A haiku is copyrightable. You don't need two paragraphs.

If the work is original, it's copyrightable.

Your problam wasn't quantity of words, it's the context of the use.

[da_chimperor]

2. What an ass

Taking the example of someone who is devoted to what they're doing enough to face lots of rejections and still continue and turning it around into a snide remark. What the hell does he know. I prefer high-quality publications like the economist. Opinion columns from guys like this do a lot to tarnish the reputation of a newspaper.

[LTR]

3. Taranto is a lazy hack 'writer'

This isn't the first time he's quoted DU. He's done it a few times before, since he can't write anything himself.

Quoting message boards and trying to say it represents a whole group is just plain lazy and irresponsible. If I were you, I'd write the WSJ and call him out with what I just said.

WSJ is a great newspaper with a juvenile and childish op-ed section. Too sad.

[CalProf]

18. You got that right

He once misquoted a LTE I wrote to the SF Chron, and next thing I know I was getting death threats from reichwingers all over the country. (Since I have a public job and am easy to find, these threats did bother me for a few days.)

He's a complete hack. Come the revolution, he's one of the first up against th wall...

[Spiffarino]

4. WSJ, and Taranto in particular, are corporate whores

The only people who read the WSJ are greedy little vermin who would love to see our democracy replaced by a feudal empire. Their time is almost up. Have fun printing that, Taranto! :hi:

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. Can you ask

that the entire post be quoted? If so, then I'd always mention something bad about the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, I think that it is a tome that caters to the Republican base, not undecideds.

[havocmom]

7. Google any screen names you use on any discussion boards.

You will probably be amazed!

[progressivebydesign]

25. I did! It was hilarious!! I'm on some wingnut blogs...

I LOVE how the weakminded, weakhearted right wingers take a post from somewhere else and act as though they're debating us. Too frightened to do a real give and take. It was a hoot! They also think I'm a dude, which is equally funny. I must write masculinely.

I don't usually write anything there too inflammable.. but they took issue with my assertions that Frist is a kitten killer and torturer.. which HE ADMITTED he was... so BFD.

[laylah]

31. I guess I must

try harder to post intelligently...I'm nowhere to be found :silly:

Jenn

[havocmom]

35. You must work harder to piss off the radical right!

Keep going, somebody somewhere will get pissed off enough to take exception. Part of the trouble is numbers. Look at how many evilDUers there are! Plus the trolls have all those other boards to stalk and get their panties in a twist over. ;)

[Protected]

8. Who cares what they say?

This is a internet message board for crying out loud.

[Piperay]

15. and anyone can

post anything they want and no one knows whether they made it up or not. It doesn't say much for a "legit" paper that feels they need to quote stuff they found on an anonymous board. :silly:

[dumpster_baby]

10. taranto and his ilk should be tried for economic treason

....in a court of law, after being indicted.

[Piperay]

12. They're stupid for quoting anonymous

posts off the Internet, they have no idea whether you are telling the truth or lying....so much for accuracy in the media. :eyes:

[dennis4868]

16. or the WSJ.....

could log onto DU, get a username and then post anything they want and then use it against Kerry....

[Downtown Hound]

13. The WSJ editorial writers

have always been a bunch of gun powder brained braying morons. I wouldn't worry too much about it. I would encourage you to write them though, just to let them know that they can't kick you around too much. But don't expect them to change. They belong at the New York Post, not the WSJ.

[eyesroll]

14. They are within their rights, but it's extremely lazy...

For one thing, the WSJ (and any other entity that takes posts on DU, FR, or anywhere else on the Internet as gospel) has no way of knowing whether you actually exist or not. You could be one of some bored kid's 10,000 sock puppets. You could be someone posting BS for kicks. You could be a troll (not that I think you're any of these things -- but since I don't know you personally and you post under a screenname, I have no way of knowing).

This is maybe one step up from gossip-column "blind items" ("overheard: A certain blond bombshell laid a bombshell of her own on her hubby in Tavern on the Green last night...could he be on the outs?").

[henslee]

21. No worries. Welcome to the big leagues. This will blow over and only

bring more good eyeballs to DU and DU talking points. Remember the addage that all publicity is good publicity. Move on. Enjoy your 15 minutes!!!!

[Lefty48197]

23. Just in case the WSJ refers to this thread:

I'd like to remind everybody that they are a right wing sh*twipe, worth far less than the trees they cut down to make the paper from.
I won't bother to bring up the fact that the asshol* that writes the editorials hounded Vince Foster to suicide.

[LTR]

26. A little something about WSJ's opinion page

From DUer Scoobie Davis' blog:

http://www.scoobiedavis.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_scoobiedavis_archive.html

Robert Bartley's Legacy of Shame
It's not nice to speak ill of the dead. However, in the case of the Wall Street Journal's Robert Bartley--whom former colleagues James Taranto and Peggy Noonan respectively called "a journalistic giant" and "freedom's best friend"--it is appropriate. The only difference between Bartley--who headed the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages--and Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, is that Blair and Glass lied to help their careers--Bartley lied to undermine democracy and smear political opponents. It was fitting that George W. Bush gave Bartley the Presidential Medal of Freedom; a fraudulent president gave a fraudulent journalist this award because the fraudulent president's idea of a patriot is someone who helps him out--and Bartley's fraudulent journalism aided Bush big time.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page under Bartley was the most scurrilous editorial page of any newspaper not owned by a South Korean businessman who thinks he's God. It was fitting that when Bartley stepped down, Paul Gigot took over (Gigot, if you'll remember, applauded the GOP-led operatives who violently prevented vote-counting in Miami-Dade County in 2000--Gigot called the anti-democratic thugs "bourgeois rioters"). During Bill Clinton's presidency, the WSJ editorial page printed every nutball conspiracy theory out there--such as the notorious Mena conspiracy; at least bottom-feeders like Joseph Farah and Christopher Ruddy could say that they were motivated by a paranoid billionaire's money to prostitute their journalistic integrity. What was Bartley's excuse? I could go on about the editorial page under Bartley; one anecdote amused me: on the same day the Journal's editorial page applauded Bill Sammon's book, Sammon was being exposed as a journalistic fraud.

Bartley was a man who didn't care about the destruction he caused to journalism or to American institutions. When David Brock--at long last--came clean and told the truth about the smear campaign of which he was a party, Bartley dismissed him as "the John Walker Lindh of contemporary conservatism" rather than engaging in any self-reflection. This lack of self-reflection is what has mystified me about the older members of the right's smear machine: when you get to the point in your life in which the years you have lived are longer than the years you have to live, you usually decide that life is too short to be an asshole. Not true for Robert Bartley. What a waste of talent.


His biography, from WSJ:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/bios/bio_taranto.html



James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com, author of its popular Best of the Web Today column and co-editor of "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House" (Wall Street Journal Books, 2004). Until the site's launch in 2000 he was deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. He joined the Journal in 1996 as an assistant editorial features editor after spending five years as an editor at City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's quarterly of urban public policy. He has also worked for the Heritage Foundation, United Press International, Reason magazine and KNX News Radio in Los Angeles. He attended California State University, Northridge.

A few items from Media Matters for America:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200405210004
http://mediamatters.org/items/200406100001
http://mediamatters.org/items/200406100008

And Tarantula laughs at death:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003225

No Waaaaaaaaaaaa!
"A man protesting the looming U.S. war on Iraq fell to his death from San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Bridge on Wednesday as he was hanging a banner," Reuters reports.

Meanwhile in Olympia, Wash.--hometown of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old terror advocate who got herself killed by sitting in front of a moving bulldozer--a man named Jody Mason chained himself to a building owned by the Grange, "a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that advocates for residents in rural areas," the Olympian reports. "He told employees he'd chained himself to the building in civil disobedience Monday night after listening to President Bush's televised ultimatum to Saddam Hussein." He mistakenly thought it was an office of the U.S. Department of Energy. Police had to use "heavy-duty bolt cutters" to free Mason. "He asked for help because he didn't have the key," Cmdr. Steve Nelson of Olympia's finest tells the paper.

In the National Post, Hugo Gurdon describes a scene at a weekend "antiwar" protest in Washington:

'Among the protesters, one in particular caught my eye. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Mr. Bush on it looking dopey. Beneath the unflattering screen print were the words: "And you thought Quayle was stupid."'

'My impulse was to respond: "If the Left is so clever, why hasn't it thought of a new insult for a century and a half?" It's that long since J.S. Mill first called the British Tories the "stupid party," and the Left has retailed this canard about conservatives ever since. Let's see, it has mocked Dubya, his father, Reagan, and Eisenhower for supposed boneheadedness, and others no longer within living memory. When will they learn to stop underestimating their enemies? When will they get bored of repeating the same stupid lie?'

C'mon, Hugo, that's asking a bit much from folks who haven't even learned not to play in traffic or tempt gravity.


"Piece of shit" is just too kind a thing to call James Tarantula. He's a male Ann Coulter with fatter tits.

[A_Possum]

28. Oh dear

What a ghastly photo.

[Dob Bole]

24. Hey Wall Street Journal!!!! Go F*** YOURSELVES!!!!! (nt)

[John_H]

27. Waaaaaaahhhh. Jimmy called me a worm!! He looks so un-vermin like!!!

Jimmy, all those kids who called you rat boy in middle school didn't scar you that badly did they! C'mon, chins up, old boy.

[Darby]

29. http://mediamatters.org/items/200408060010

http://mediamatters.org/items/200408060010

[John_H]

30. what are we looking for here? Am I blind?

[spooky3]

32. WSJ is losing subscribers daily because of this kind of BS.

Yes, Dems are interested in and succeeding in business, and many Dems CAN afford to buy the WSJ, but no longer subscribe because they prefer not to support this kind of crap.

Really good marketing strategy to insult half of your prospective readership.

[Cocoa]

33. Corsi's freeper posts were used against him

with hilarious results.

(Jerome Corsi, co-author of swiftboat book)

[blondeatlast]

34. Some choicer posts (from MediaMatters, I haven't the stomach

for "that" site):

CORSI: Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's first act in office was to promote "gays in the military." RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together. (11/18/2001)

On Senator John Kerry

CORSI: First let's undermine the US in Vietnam. Then we can go for gay marriage. When you get to be Pres. JFK-lite, there will be no end to how much of America we can destroy. (05/17/2004)

CORSI: Just don't let anybody put a tablet with the Ten Commandments in front of the school where that girl wants to wear a Muslim scarf -- OH, No --- then the RATS would complain. Anti-Christian, Anti-American -- just like their Presidential Candidate -- Jean Francois Kerrie. (03/31/2004)

CORSI: After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal gradparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry? (03/04/2004)

CORSI: Kerry has a long history of Communist supporters. (03/12/2004)

CORSI: Kerry offers a clear choice. Anti-American hatred. (02/08/2004)

CORSI: John F*ing Commie Kerry and Commie Ted discuss their plan to hand America over to our nation's enemies. (02/04/2004)


On Chelsea Clinton

CORSI: According to Talk Magazine, Chubby Chelsea had a very great adventure on 9/11 in NYC and Hell-ary had the details wrong -- oh, it was terrible. (12/07/2001)

CORSI: Did the Journalist see Chubbie Chelsea among the wives. Little Katie Communist on the NBC Today show interviewed Hillary this morning and mom is worried sick about Chelsea. She was last seen in Kandahar at a Starbucks. But now, as Little Katie Communist sighed, "Who Knows?" Even British disinformation planted reports such as this grocery crap will be useful. Anyone with information about Chubbie Chelsea's whereabouts should post it now. Mom wants to know her daughter is out of harms way. Mom also wants to be at the center of the story. (11/29/2001)

CORSI: But the real question is: WHERE IS CHUBBIE CHELSEA? Is she in Kabul in danger, looking for a Starbucks? Waldo wants to know. Please, Little Katie Communist, HELP US FIND CHELSEA. THE SITUATION MAY BE URGENT. (11/29/2001)

CORSI: HILLARY SAYS CHELSEA IS MISSING AND JANET RHINO DOESN'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS? (11/28/2001)

Yikes.

[HFishbine]

36. Taranto, Please Use My Post in Your Next Column

Taranto is an intellectually dishonest shill for narrow special interests and his readers would be well-advised to turn to other sources for the truth. Trust Taranto at your own peril.