It never ceases to amaze me just how clueless some companies are these days with the reality that their customers, readers or viewers are in the drivers seat. Two companies who clearly still are oblivious to this reality are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times seem to be of the mind that while they are fine with aggregating the news, others who do it are somehow in the wrong?

To make matters worse, it seems that there is the potential for some companies to throw such a fit as to potentially mount up legal battles over this. Think about this for a moment now. User A links to site B. Site B gets mad, sues user who runs site A who likely is sending site B tremendous amounts of traffic which can be monetized if site B had a clue. The whole thing is enough to boggle the mind.

So where do we go from here. Do we simply stop reading from sources that we feel are no longer playing ball? Or instead, opt to make sure that when we link to stories or quote them, we make sure to get permission first? This may have been the case in the print world, but this is really failing big time in the virtual one.