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aking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it.

Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use.

It is now clear that it is as disruptive to today's newspapers as Gutenberg's invention of movable type was to the town criers, the journalists of the 15th century.

The Internet wrecks the old newspaper business model in two ways. It moves information with zero variable cost, which means it has no barriers to growth, unlike a newspaper, which has to pay for paper, ink and transportation in direct proportion to the number of copies produced.

And the Internet's entry costs are low.

in my view there is no need for a digital editor as such in a trade publishing house, rather an editor who understands the digital world:

it’s marketing that will have to continue to change the most to find new readers and new ways of reaching readers.

Writing that uses new media by incorporating visuals, sound, movies and so on in different delivery platforms such as the new Sony Reader, Alternate Reality Games mixing narrative and interaction by readers and contributors, self-published material, collaborative wikinovels and other kinds of informal, or extra-formal creativity, are exactly the kind of material that a traditional trade publishing house such as Pan Macmillan, however innovative, finds it very difficult to use, or even acknowledge, in a publishing process, and it’s unlikely to be seriously practical in the short term, which means until someone can think of a way to make money out of it, not least because digital projects are typically seen by customers and authors as free or very low-cost, when in fact they’re often more expensive than traditional ones because of the high set-up and development costs

In the U.S., public figures have to prove that statements about them are false and made with malice -- but in Britain a statement that harms one's reputation is enough to justify a libel action. Defendants must prove that statements are true or "fair comment." This has a chilling effect on the reporting of damaging facts.

"If information cannot be freely exchanged, if journalists must fear being sued over information reported in good faith on matters crucial to our defense, matters such as the financial networks supporting jihadist terror, then we cannot make sound security policy," former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said at a recent conference on "libel lawfare." This is a useful term to describe lawsuits to suppress facts about radical Islam and terrorism.

The Web means that publishing anywhere means publishing everywhere, thus subjecting authors and publishers to litigation in pro-plaintiff jurisdictions