AP doth protest too much, methinks.

It’s interesting how often the people who scream the loudest about a problem are the ones who in fact are vulnerable to precisely the criticism they are voicing.  I’m no psychologist, though you clearly need no professional degree to understand that zealotry apparent certainty can betray insecurity. AP has of late been rather extreme in its rush to protect its rights in copyrighted material. Now AP seems poised to take on Google’s contention that it is engaged in non-infringing fair use when it engages in its regular practice of displaying the headline and lead paragraph, along with credit and a direct link, of the news stories published by, among others, AP.

As Larry Dignan points out on ZDNet, AP regularly — a lot, every day — reports stories that are based purely on other public sources without either acknowledging or linking to those sources.  He concludes that “once folks figure out they can damn near replicate most of the AP just by finding source material things are going to get ugly quickly.”

Question authority, and then question those questioning authority

It may seem off topic to engage in a prediction regarding a sports event, but let it be heard here first — this weekend Michigan will beat Ohio State in football. In fact, you are likely to hear it nowhere else. Michigan is suffering its worst football season in history. Ohio sports writers are writing things like “Michigan (3-8) couldn’t be a bigger underdog if it were coming off a loss to St. Ignatius [an Ohio high school football power] at home instead of a loss to Northwestern.”

But my point is this: lawyers beat adversaries who never question the assumptions and premises most people never question. Lawyers need to make decisions. That’s a topic for another day. And one could question premises and assumptions forever without ever coming to a decision, so I’m not suggesting that one engage in perpetual questioning, that one ape Hamlet.

Rather, I am suggesting that the common wisdom is far more common than it is wise and that no lawyer ever got far for long by going with his unexamined gut instincts. And it almost seems a law of sports that when one team is considered unbeatable it will lose.

In the political arena, Tom Tomorrow has it right on.

Oh yeah: GO BLUE!

p.s. A friend at the ABA Journal is asking lawyers to complete the Journal’s survey on how you think the recession will affect the legal profession. You can do so here. All I know is that if Congress doesn’t help out the auto industry there are an awful lot of people in Michigan and Ohio who will lose their jobs and/or never get paid for goods and services they have already provided. I suppose, though, that bankruptcy lawyers will make out well.