The Federal Election Commission is mulling regulating blogs, notes Michael Bassik. An FCC member suggests bloggers’ links might be regulated: “Would a link to a candidate’s page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they’re at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.”

So we’ll be regulating the ability of American citizens to express themselves online.

Glenn Wilson (a party to the suit in question) e-mails:

The copyright protection status of every electronic journal in the country is on the line. Please listen up and get ready to help.

All online publishers should file friend of the court briefs in the case of Glynn Wilson v. Random House and Kitty Kelly for plagiarizing Glynn Wilson’s Bush AWOL story.

Otherwise, a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama is about to rule, effectively, that we have no copyright protection publishing online. THIS IS A HUGE DEAL.

The copyright office at the Library of Congress needs to write some new rules on this. They now say that electronic journals do not have to mail register stories to be protected. But the legal precedents under the old statute say you do. This is a gray area in the law that needs to be cleared up.

Certainly it was not Thomas Jefferson’s intent to allow corporate publishers to steal from online publications without fear of being sued for copyright violation for plagiarism. Was it? So the spirit of the law and the purpose of the law is on our side, if the precedents are not.

This is a huge national story. Please check with your legal counsel and your editor and publisher and get involved.

Brian Clark, who orchestrated last fall’s purchase for Sharp TV and has a shockingly fun order up his sleeve:

Blog ads (in the generic sense, and especially BlogAds in the particular sense) are… bringing ads into the conversation. If they are done right, they out-perform traditional creative placements by so much it makes my clients nervous for me to talk about particulars.

Last year we had a lot of fun doing a reader survey. With the dust of the election settled and lots of folks chattering about “whither blogs?” it’s time to do another.

If you want to send readers to do the survey, just link to the 2005 blog reader survey (copy/ paste this actual link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=34292894798 into your blog) and tell people to supply your blog’s name as the answer to question #16. The survey should take about four minutes to complete. The results will help us communicate with advertisers, the press and the public about the huge and unique audience that blogs serve.

If your blog readers put your blog name in #16, we’ll then happily provide you the full data broken out for your own readership in coming weeks.

The newest version of Pennacchio’s blogad links to bloggers talking about his campaign. As one blogger puts it: “Dr. P channels the spirit of Howard Dean.”

An EPA-approved doomsday.