The Associated Press stirred up some trouble last week by dropping the hammer on a site called the Drudge Retort.

The Retort started as a parody of the Drudge Report and has now turned into a news aggregation service. Visitors post excerpts from news stories and invite others to comment. A user posted 18 words from an AP story and a 32-word quote from Hillary Clinton.

The Associated Press considered that a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation and told the Drudge Retort to take it down.

Until now, bloggers have relied on the concept of fair use to protect them from legal threats like this. The U.S. Copyright Office defines fair use as "various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research."

How much can a blogger quote from a news story without violating copyright? The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law seems to support blogging in spirit, if not explicitly. According to this revision, fair use can cover:

1. Quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment;

2. Quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations;

3. Use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied;

4. Or, summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report.

The Drudge Retort posts seem to be summaries used in a news report, but the Associated Press has a very different definition of "brief." The AP's intellectual property governance coordinator, Irene Keselman, laid out the case to journalist/blogger Rogers Cadenhead:

Ms. Keselman said: "AP considers that the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use. The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only.

This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of fair use. AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights and additionally constitutes hot news' misappropriation."

This is heavy-handed, and a large number of bloggers seem to agree. The AP letters triggered a firestorm of criticism.

My favorite example comes from Jeff Jarvis, who said in a post, "I talked to a reporter this week about the embattled Associated Press and said three times that I didn't want it to die. I might take that back."

The criticism was so intense that The Associated Press was forced to back down. The AP now plans to meet with the Media Bloggers Association and work up guidelines.

Michael Duff writes an Internet culture column for Morris News Service.