AP Fighting the Wrong Fight?

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air thinks so:

Besides, the AP doesn’t get to determine what “fair use” means; Congress does. It has been a long-accepted practice for commentators to use small excerpts from articles in order to both report the news and to comment on its delivery. This goes back decades, when reviewers excerpted novels and media critics excerpted each other to deliver critiques. Just because the AP doesn’t like copyright law doesn’t mean it doesn’t still applies to them. However, the threat of legal action and the cost to people working on small revenue streams will mean that their threats will mostly be effective.

For those that don't know, The Associated Press is planning to "package" their articles in web searches, both to limit a report's use without payment and to send back info on the usage of the report to the AP mothership. I'm not as peeved as Morrissey, but I read where he's coming from. Right now, so much online news is free and, from my vantage, news junkies have never spent so much time reading. It's not just the low cost, it's the paperless convenience and constant updates. Where are the readers going to go when the AP trotts out a fee? And what about bloggers, both well-known and obscure? We'll link elsewhere, promoting other ad space, dammit.

This developement reminds us yet again why not just news, but perhaps nearly all information (barring formal ed.) should be freely accessible to the public. Consider the alternative. The Internet is humankind's final, infinite frontier. So long as there is another server to store information, there's always a piece of cyber real estate to build on. This intangible universe can only be hoped to be controlled by an omniscient, invasive authority, one that would violate many of our civil liberties just to keep a story profitable. Let's go the other way on this.