Rogers Cadenhead has long run a site called the Drudge Retort at www.drudge.com. Today he posted the news that the site has been targeted by the Associated Press with DMCA takedown orders. AP is complaining about a bunch of posts on Drudge Retort that contain brief excerpts of longer AP stories and links to those stories on other sites.

According to the AP, this is copyright infringement. (Here’s the text of the complaint.)

If the AP is right, then something like 99.9% of the world’s millions of bloggers are engaged in copyright infringement, simply by excerpting the articles bloggers link to.

Something’s wrong with this picture!

Fair use has always been a sticky area of the law because there are no clear boundaries to what’s acceptable; instead there is a set of principles that get weighed to determine whether the reuse of copyrighted material is considered to fall under fair use.

One thing that I always assumed was clear fair use, though, was short excerpts of longer articles, properly credited and linked to, for the purpose of commentary. This meets several of the fair use criteria (amount used, transformation of the work, effect of use on work’s market value) head on.

Of course I Am Not a Lawyer, but I dealt with this sort of thing for years at Salon. (We took considerable umbrage at the way users at certain sites reposted entire Salon articles which they wanted to read and critique. Because they disagreed with us politically, they wanted to deny us the ad revenue we’d get if they read the articles on our site. This was not fair use. But they could have excerpted and linked easily enough!)

It looks to me like Cadenhead is being targeted for some other reason, with the infringement complaint as some sort of smokescreen. Either that, or the AP has decided it wants to blow up the blogosphere. Since bloggers are some of the most avid consumers of news, this sue-your-customers strategy is likely to be about as effective as the RIAA’s was.

Here’s a few other links carrying on from yesterday’s post about Nick Carr’s lament that Google and the web in general have made it harder for us to pay attention to books.

Howard Rheingold links to a post on Timothy Ferriss’s blog, by Josh Waitzkin, titled “the multitasking virus.” Waitzkin paints a scene in which listless college students shop on their laptops while their professor’s giving an inspired lecture on Gandhi and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Howard, ever the intelligent pragmatist, says he’s most interested in “engaging students in learning how to train their attention.” He’s right. Most of us, today, could use some serious and rigorous training in attention-focusing skills. Meditation is probably the best. Organizational tools can help, too. Whatever works for you. Howard used to urge people to “pay attention to what you’re paying attention to,” and that was good advice; today we also need to pay attention to how we’re paying attention.

It’s undeniable that the web and all its tools add to the volume of potential interruptions in the workday. There’s nothing new about the interruptions themselves, and we faced them long before we had computers on our desks. (My reading of the Waitzkin post, for instance, was interrupted by an unsolicited telemarketing phone call which, however noble the cause — the American Cancer Society — constituted a far more severe violation of my focus than anything my computer screen can throw at me.) But the Net gives anyone with a proclivity for procrastination a nearly infinite number of options to avoid doing whatever one Must Get Done.

This topic is only going to become more urgent. Today’s Wall Street Journal included a review of a new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, which I just ordered (it’s by a writer named Maggie Jackson, and has a foreword by my friend Bill McKibben). I’ll look forward to reading the book when I get it. (I hope it’s better than the hilariously overwrought subtitle.)

In the meantime, I should say that the Journal reviewer, David Robinson, lost me when he declared that Twitter is “an update service devoted to what-are-you-doing-at-this-moment inanity.” Sure, there are plenty of Twitter users who are inane, but — after a period in which I couldn’t quite get what all the fuss was about — I’m finding my small-but-growing group of people-who-I-follow to be a valuable source of real-time Web pointers. Like any popular Web platform, Twitter is as bad or as good as whatever sliver of it you choose to pay attention to.

Right about now is where I should say that I heard about Howard’s post itself because he posted about it on Twitter.

• Blogopticon | vanityfair.com: Chart professes to track popular blogs along two axes, news/opinion and scurrilous/earnest, but it is ridiculous and riddled with errors (BoingBoing started as a webzine? who knew!) I mean, Valleywag is more earnest than scurrilous? Huh?

• Jane Hamsher: Mayhill Fowler and the Sock Puppetry of Politico: While everyone is complaining that Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter to Clinton (and yeah, she should have, but he should have known he was on the record, too, right? He’s the pro?), the Politico editor argues that sockpuppetry (disguising yourself in blog comments) is no big deal. How frequently can the pros shoot themselves in the feet before there’s no foot left to shoot?

• Opera releases 9.5 edition of browser: been using Opera as my primary browser since 2000 or so. Firefox is great too — 3.0 due out soon! — but Opera does some remarkable things, and I still find it more responsive to the way I work (millions of open tabs, nearly all the time). Though with Firefox 3.0 I’ll have to consider, once more, whether to switch.

• Brainstorm: The Wikipedia Style - Chronicle.com: “Wikipedia is, indeed, a marvelous source for a quick date, fact, definition, event. But in style, most entries are deadening. Students assimilate the idiom every time they call it up.”

The funny thing about Nick Carr’s Atlantic cover piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” is that the piece itself has the truncated quality that it blames the Internet for imposing on our culture. When my copy of the magazine (yes, I actually subscribe on paper) arrived I saw the headline and looked forward to a really thorough, in-depth look at this question. Carr’s entirely capable of that; I disagree with much of his perspective in “The Big Switch,” but it’s one of the more cogent and sustained critiques of the Web 2.0 future, and anything but lightweight. So I figured the Atlantic had paid Carr to do what the Atlantic, and only a tiny handful of outlets, can still do: spend many thousands of words digging into the heart of an important issue.

Ah, well. You can still find such pieces in the Atlantic (like this one about rising crime rates in mid-sized American cities), but Carr’s isn’t one of them. At 4000 words, it’s barely longer than the kind of thing Salon does every day. It’s a provocative read scattered with tasty quotes and anecdotes; it asks a useful question but does little to answer it. Carr starts off describing a sense of alienation from old-fashioned reading that he shares with several other people he quotes:

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Like Carr, I’ve found myself reading fewer books over the past decade. I can’t tell whether it’s because I’m spending more time on the Web (certainly possible). In my case, if my attention span has shortened at all, I think it’s far more likely that, for instance, raising children has cut into both my available time and my reserve of repose (both actual physical sleep time and emotional reserve of patience). But when I do get the chance to sit back with a good book — like two I’ve recently finished, Faking It (with related blog by authors Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker) and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (also with author blog) — I don’t feel any less absorbed than when I was a teenager plowing my way through a shelf of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

I don’t want to discourage you from reading Carr’s article and pondering the issues it raises. Does Google represent the digital apotheosis of Taylorism (the industrial-age science of labor measurement)? Does the Web crowd out the opportunity for leisurely contemplation or “slow, concentrated thought”? Those of us who use the Web constantly are probably experiencing changes in how we read and think; what are those changes?

These aren’t stupid questions. But they deserve deeper contemplation than Carr has provided. His piece is less like a thoroughly researched magazine piece than, say, the prospectus for a writing project. Perhaps the Atlantic has simply published Carr’s next book proposal. If so, I’d look forward to reading the resulting book — in a relaxed, contemplative way, of course.

Further discussion from Matthew Ingram, Matt Asay and Blaise Alleyne.

UPDATE: Jon Udell finds Carr’s critique “spot on.”

Apologies for the light posting, which will continue for a bit. Combination of head-down-in-book-work and family commitments. Got a long post from the D conference brewing, but haven’t been able to pull it together yet.

In the meantime, interesting piece in today’s Journal about the failure (so far) of much-touted Washington Post “hyperlocal” experiment, LoudounExtra.com. The guy in charge, Rob Curley, admits he spent too much time talking up the project with news executives and not enough actually getting to know the people the site was supposed to be serving. (Points, at least, for honesty.) A classic community-building mistake that I’m sure he won’t make again.

But what caught my eye was this bit tucked in a background graph about Curley:

Perhaps his biggest success was the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World’s KUSports.com, a site dedicated to University of Kansas sports that grew during Mr. Curley’s three-year reign from 500,000 monthly page views to a one-time peak of about 13 million monthly page views.

Page views, though superior to the old “hit” metric, were never an ideal measure of real value in online publishing (I wrote about this in Salon in 1999). In the era of Ajax-style web applications, where the browser might stay on one page while you work on email or something else for a half hour, page-views are meaningless. Once upon a time, sites broke up long articles into pages to squeeze out a few more ad impressions; today, pages are less and less the unit of web content, which now comes at us in widgets and RSS and a hundred other generated-and-remixed formats.

It was so quaint to see a big page-view number touted as the sign of a site’s success in 2008 — like a dotcom bubble flashback…