Cory Doctorow gets pretty excited about this stuff, but he's not exactly wrong:

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

My guess is that it is designed in part to go after big time bloggers and commentary sites who routinely rip the press apart. I doubt it is just a misguided attempt to generate revenue.

It's vaguely like Joe the Plummer — the guy finds a microphone stuck before him and has a chance to speak his voice — the media is horrified at how it turned out – solely based on their own political leanings – so they try to destroy the guy in the public's mind.

Sites like Newsbusters (or for that matter Media Matters) use quotes from the media everyday, all day to point to what they see as gross violations of neutrality in the media – and to attack liberals (or conservatives) caught in the public eye. Increasingly, print and TV journalism and opinion outlets have one or more blogs of their own where they site people.

Overall, blogging has allowed more people and orgs to speak their mind when it comes to politics and anything else. One result of this has been the news media image taking a vicious beating each and every week. Before, if you wanted to get a full flavor of press bias, you'd have to read several different big time outlets yourself. Now, you don't. If one of them prints or puts on air something obviously bias, it flies around the Internet at lightspeed.

These coming rules are meant to take a bite out of that just like the move toward renewing the Fairness Doctrine is meant to take a bite out of talk radio.

Maybe it will generate an insignificant amount of revenue when some of the more popular blogs and commentary sites agree to pay to quote them, but the average person won't pay. They'll quote anyway and count on not being sued. Or if the media finds a way to block exerting without paying, they'll go to paraphrasing…

The charging for quoting is really ridiculous when you see that they don't charge random viewers for the full content anyway.

The only choice for the media to try to return to the good ole days when they could dominate access to information is to require people to pay a monthly or yearly user fee for all or nearly all of their current content.

But that won't really work. The society's view of the value of the "nonpartisan" news media keeps sinking lower and lower. People are not going to pay to read these outlets online. It would be interesting to see if they could generate as much revenue with a user fee system vs ad revenue they currently generate.

If they attempt to charge for quoting them on the common blogs, their ad revenue will plummet, because they will destroy the best advertisement they have for their own website — people quoting and linking to them…

One of the big criticisms of blogs and bloggers is that they haven't established their own sources and rely too much, if not exclusively, on what the mainstream media does. That's a valid criticism in part, and I try to mix it up with a variety of posts and formats. But, I say this without trying to be too pompous, I think some bloggers here do a good service by commenting on the media and what the media's doing: shoddy journalism, quotation fabrication, or negative portrayals of teachers, service(wo)men, etc.

As far as good ideas, according to your last paragraph, I'm not sure I have any right now. Perhaps it would be a good idea to allow bloggers to, say, excerpt 25% of an article provided they attribute the source. Bloggers who selectively excerpt now are helping, not hurting, readership of the online newspapers, and bloggers who can fit together various sources and also add commentary are doing a service to mainstream media by bringing it readers it otherwise might not have.

But where does that leave us in a place like Korea, where copyright comes to die? Korea Beat frequently posts examples of the Chosun Ilbo website taking screenshots of foreign webpages and presenting these pictures as their own, as a way to avoid paying whatever fees are required. And it's common practice in local papers to give rundowns of what foreign media is saying about a particular Korean issue.

Maybe somebody else can shed some light on this, but in Korea it's also common to quote online messageboard users as sources. The Korea Times, for instance, will quote from Dave's ESL Cafe on teacher issues, and Korean-language sources do it all the time. I myself have a weekly thing in the Joongang Ilbo where I compile some of my reader comments into a column. Do these mainstream media sources have permission to quote extensively from online forums?