The New York Crank crankily concurs with TechCrunch.com on this

@%&!!# it!

I am sick of doing media stories. This isn’t an effing media blog. It’s mostly a cranky political blog. But my hand is being forced by the Associated Press.

If I’ve been following all the news stories correctly, the AP is threatening to bring it’s considerable resources down on the head of any poor wretch of a blogger who dares to link to an AP story. For that matter, the way I've read some news stories, they're even threatening bloggers who link to any newspaper story in a paper, website or broadcast medium that is a member ofthe AP. In daily journalism, that’s about every one of ‘em.

The nincompoops on the AP board are the thickest dunderheads to come down the pike since God invented the morons who defend AIG bonuses.

The AP's theory is that even by linking to their content — or to the various online publications that use their content — bloggers, including us unpaid bloggers, are somehow profiting from their labor.

Gimme a break! When we link our comments about the news to a newspaper or AP story, we're generating traffic for their own websites, which profit from every page view. If they stop us, they're cutting off their noses to...well, you know the old cliche. The AP reminds me of the 19th Century Luddites who destroyed the fabric mills that might have directly or indirectly employed them so they could eke out a subsistence living as cottage weavers.

This idiocy needs to be slapped down. So I have to concur with techcrunch.com, that hereafter I will not link to any AP story, or to any newspaper website which on at least cursory inspection appears to belong to AP.

Instead, I will hearafter mention that “I read somewhere…” or that “I heard on a bus…” since what I’ll be repeating will be old news by the time I heard about it anyway. Who knows where I hear about things these days? A bus is as good as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. They can go generate their own Internet views. Got me?

For additional details on the total idiocy of the AP policy, see Mathew Ingram’s analysis, here.