After further consideration, Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee has decided to support the $2.50/word charge. Why? In exchange for the charges, he proposes a policy where the AP has to pay for editorial corrections for its stories. Why not? It makes as much sense as their attempts to override federal fair use laws.

While you’ve got your checkbook open, AP, you owe some other bloggers some serious coinage. Per the AP’s own charge-per-word policy, Michelle Malkin is owed over $130,000 for the content the AP used from her site. That’s OK; I’m sure the AP can afford it after charging bloggers $2.50/word for using their stories.

Ooh, Ooh, and you’ll be receiving a bill from Macsmind pretty soon. See, his policy is charging $100 per word (hey, why not while we’re at rewriting copyright law?). Turns out you’ve used at least 62 words from his posts, bringing your grand total for him up to $6,200.

This is getting pricey!

Update: Markos (yeah, the AP’s got me taking sides with him) has an alternative strategy. He starts his post by using 120 words from an AP. He then writes:

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn’t get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they’ll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.