ICB Asked to Cease and Desist by The Idaho Statesman? Not Quite.

Hello Conservatives,

Tonight I received an email from David Staats the Local News Editor at The Idaho Statesman which read in part,

“Every story in the Statesman, in print or online, is copyrighted under federal law, either by us or by the organization supplying it to us to use by permission, and none of it may be reproduced without permission. We ask that you please ask permission to link to any Statesman story, and please provide only a brief summary on your site and a link from your site to the story on ours.”

Now don’t misunderstand, Mr. Staats was very polite to ICB on this issue. The meat of the request is provided above but in the rest of the email he was cordial. I have agreed to this request and as you might have noticed, all my links to the Idaho Statesman have been removed from ICB.

If you are a regular reader to ICB you are well aware, like many bloggers I link to hundreds of stories, local and national that I think you might be interested in reading and it would be time prohibitive for me to ask permission from the Idaho Statesman every time I find one you might be interested in reading from one of their fine reporters. . It’s too bad because ICB felt it was really a win win for us both. ICB get’s hundreds of readers a week and my readers certainly go to the Statesman via my links to them.

This is not in any way a slam at the Idaho Statesman. They are running a business and being the pro capitalist I am, I support their drive to make money on unique stories only available at their web page or paper. I’m a bit surprised why ICB was singled out when I find links to Statesman articles all over the web but, okay.

I simply tell you this so you will understand why previous links are now gone and there will not be future links. I greatly appreciate and respect the staff and writers at the Statesman and will miss them on my pages.

ICB