According to tech journalist Kara Swisher, some members of Yahoo’s board of directors have renewed discussions with Microsoft about a possible sale of the company to Microsoft.

Such talks appear to be the result of the AOL-Yahoo merger talks making little progress, and fears that the Justice Department will block Yahoo’s proposed advertising deal with Google.

Source: Kara Swisher, “The Deal Dance: AOL and Yahoo (and Even Google and Microsoft) Continue to Waltz”, All Things Digital, October 28, 2008

In a move to rein in bloggers inclined to interpret “copyright” as their right to copy, U.S. based news organization, The Associated Press, plans to introduce clear standards about how much of its content may be reproduced or excerpted in blogs without infringing its copyright.

The Associated Press - a not for profit group of 1,500 newspapers, including The New York Times - has not yet specified what these standards will be, but according to Saul Hansell, a journalist with The New York Times, the A.P. is specifically seeking to disallow reproduction of its headlines and first paragraphs. Presumably that doesn’t rule out including the headline of an article in a list of sources, as we have done below!

Despite some backlash from bloggers, the A.P.’s announcement comes as bloggers push the concept of “fair use” to the limit, with many bloggers routinely copying and pasting entire articles and blog posts onto their own sites, sometimes barely providing a reference to the original material.

Unfortunately, while it’s acceptable to write about copyrighted material… the law is not so clearcut when it comes to quoting extensive passages of a work… especially when these constitute an entire blog entry. Copying and pasting without attribution, on the other hand, is plagiarism and copyright infringement for which there is certainly no “fair use” excuse.

Sources: Saul Hansell, “The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs”, The New York Times, June 16, 2008, Saul Hansell, “The A.P. Asserts Tough (and Still Secret) View of Copyright on Blogs”, The New York Times, June 20, 2008