BUT the point of this is to mention that the first blog listed has issued an apology, of sorts, if an ill-natured and badly written one.

No wonder the person had to steal your writing. And dearie, if you the stealer are reading this, changing an ocassional “she” to “he” is NOT editing and changing content. If you did it in my English class, you’d get a zero and possibly be expelled from the univerity, depending upon the strictness of the university policy.

Just so you know, Fish. I was wondering what happened regarding this and peeked today… and saw the “apology”. Now, the other two on the list haven’t done anything that I can see. I didn’t look too much at the blog, either, but she/he says that they’ve removed the offending posts.

i think that sometimes, things aren’t exactly what they seem, and just maybe, of course this is my sense of twisted humour, so maybe i’m way off base anyway… however… it strikes me, that they did it to see how you all would react to it and thus create for themselves a semblence of temporary amusement at your well trained lemming response and band wagon jump on masses mentality. congratulations. within all of your individualism, you have all wonderfully fallen into the mundane of identicalistic well media trained sameness. heh.

There is no magic number that defines “fair use.” IF there were they’d call it the “200 word rule” or something. Fair use is about… _fairness_.

Similarly, While financial gain is a factor in deciding whether or not (a) something is fair use and/or (b) the amount of damages the copyright holder can look for, it is also not on its own a determinant of fair use. Attribution is important, but lack of attribution alone probably won’t defeat a fair use argument. So too with academic use.