Speak to any teacher these days and the biggest gripe about the internet age will probably be plagiarism. Where I teach in Rome, the university has a strict "no copying" policy. If a student is caught lifting text from a website and claiming it as his own, that’s grounds for failure. End of story. And, if the crime is particularly grievous, it could lead to expulsion. The one-strike-and-you’re-out policy isn’t perfect, but it seems to strike enough fear into enough students to get them to think twice about stealing somebody else’s work on Shakespeare or Cicero or Einstein.

If only such a punishment loomed in the professional world.

The issue of acceptable copying is raging in the blogosphere this week thanks to a showdown between the Associated Press and the publisher of a well-read blog-and-news-referral network, the Drudge Retort. It’s like Digg for lefties, taking obvious swipes at the better-known, bulldog-style Drudge Report.

AP kicked off the debate last week when it issued Rogers Cadenhead, the founder and publisher of the Drudge Retort, with demands that five stories and one user comment be taken down. Mr Cadenhead was incredulous, insisting that the bloggers merely paraphrased details of a few AP articles and repeated word-for-word a single quote. By his calculations, the excerpts ran from 33 to 79 words, and each carried a link to the original article. Where’s the crime in that?

As Mr Cadenhead observes: “I have all the expertise in intellectual property law of somebody who's never been sued, so standard disclaimers apply. But I have difficulty seeing how it violates copyright law for a blogger to link to a news story with a short snippet of the story in furtherance of public discussion.”

In other words, Mr Cadenhead and many in the blogging community believe such a practice of paraphrasing and linking to the original article is perfectly acceptable under the concept of “fair use”. And the “furtherance of public discussion” can be seen as a service for a news operation as the conversation is driving traffic, in theory, to its website.

The AP disagrees. As a not-for-profit news wire funded by American newspapers, AP serves its newspaper clients and, more recently, online publishers with news from around the world. That’s about it. Even though it regards itself as “the bastion of the people’s right to know”, AP has no obligation to supply individual bloggers with the latest stock prices, photos from Baghdad or baseball scores. That news is reserved for paying clients, not those who promise to deliver a few eyeballs every week from their blogs.

To understand where the AP is coming from with this caveman approach to copyright enforcement, you have to understand what it’s like to work for a news wire. When I joined Reuters in 2001, nobody prepared me for the level of theft I would witness daily. Newspapers regularly carved up my stories and those of my colleagues and claimed them as their own. Often they’d plug in a word at the bottom indicating it came from Reuters or they would include some vague reference to “wire reports.” But just as often they would not. And, I’m not talking about pipsqueak newspapers. I’m talking about the biggest news outlets in the world blithely copying and pasting my original reportage and making just a few cosmetic changes -- typically, removing the “By Bernhard Warner” part and inserting their own name; another trick was keeping my name in and describing me as a “special correspondent” of the newspaper – and hoping I wouldn’t notice. I’m not naming names because the list is simply too long. It seemed to be every newspaper. Out of sheer frustration, my colleagues and I gave up trying to police the theft because we were always hit with the same incredulous response from a newspaper editor: “But you’re a news wire. I’m fairly certain we have a contract with you that says this is fair use.”

News wires have been struggling, with zero success, to get full credit for their work since Paul Julius Reuter began in the 1850s using carrier pigeons to send news between Germany, France and Belgium. If paying newspapers won’t abide by the rules, perhaps the wires can bully the bloggers into submission, the thinking obviously goes.

But the troubling part of the AP’s logic is that bloggers aren’t the enemy. They have the power to help the wires win this credibility battle. A referral from an influential blogger can be a traffic bonanza for a news wire and its news clients. And, more importantly, a few well-crafted words from a blogger can succeed in elevating the brand name of AP or Reuters (or now Thomson Reuters) into the everyday news discussion that happens on vibrant news forums such as Drudge Retort. The mainstream press would never allow the news wire to get top billing.

One positive development in the AP’s copyright campaign with bloggers will come later this week when AP brass meets with the Media Bloggers Association to discuss ground rules for “fair use” of its content in the blogosphere. It’s a long overdue meeting. You don’t have to search too deep into a blog to find examples of flagrant plagiarism. Again, I’m not talking about pipsqueak blogs. There is a generally accepted practice among bloggers to lift the majority of a story or even the entire text of an article from a news site and re-paste it on the blog. As long as there is a link to the original article, the thinking goes, it’s OK. It’s not. That’s not “fair use”. That’s theft. My students can tell the difference. Hopefully, after Thursday’s meeting between the AP and the Media Bloggers Association, others will too.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com