"The US government is trying to stop this kind of thing, he says, by enacting laws that prevent file sharing and the use of public figure images..."

Whether or not that is exactly what Ito said or just your interpretation of it, and whether or not the reason Ito gives for the US government "trying to stop this kind of thing" is actually the reason, it is ironic in the extreme that Thomas Jefferson's attempt to *stimulate* innovation by protecting intellectual property for a short period of time has facilitated the use of IP laws to stifle innovation.

Here is the relevant part of the US Constitution, for those who aren't already familiar with it:

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 (the "Intellectual Property Clause" also called the Patent and/or Copyright Clause) of the United States Constitution states, "Congress shall have the Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The example I cited was network TV not giving access to exclusive interviews that they had of Bush to Greenwald, a documentary producer, under the grounds that they were protected by copyright. Which is true, but my feeling is that fair use should be extended to video as liberally as it is extended to text. Lessig makes this argument well, but I think that we are accustomed to citation and attribution in deliberating using text, but this form of remixed and sampling video and audio is still much more protected by copyright.

Let me also add that the anti-P2P stuff will stifle video exchange. Also, recently pushed back by the FCC, the broadcast flag is trying to make it impossible to record television on things on hard disk recorders. Hollywood is trying to protect video content broadly through copyright legistlation and regulation of software and hardware and news media will be covered by copyright as creative works and "content" owned by networks and will legally and technically be protected in ways that text is not.

I've recently seen both Dan Gillmor's and Larry Lessig's presentations, and I agree that once you publish something (make it public) there's no way you can argue for not making it available for fair use.

But I think what's missing from the discussion around the broader topic are the concepts of attribution and what the equivalent of a set of quotation marks might be for audio and video.

Not to mention the lack of a sense of humor! Is someone really likely to be persuaded that Blair and Bush sing love songs to each other?

Greenwald asked to license 1 minute from 60 minutes NBC said no. Initially they said something like "it doesn't make the president look very good."

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Mr Hayes is overlooking the power of the new recommendation systems. Where readers vote blogger contributions up or down. Community editing if you like. Example sites are digg.com and slashdot.org. Even technorati.com and google.com feature the best quality content from mass contributors over mainstream media.

"Wisdom of the Crowds" often trumps mainstream media for content. A trend which will prove Mr Hayes totally mistaken in the future.

Yes, I agree with Paul here. When I want to read some new interesting story, my daily routine si to visit reddit, digg and del.icio.us/popular. I don't care about what the story comes from - it may come from NYT or blog I never heard about before. What I care about is how many people voted for it as being interesting, and if it really is interesting to me.