It risks suggesting fandom to repeat most everything of what Jeff Jarvis creates on Buzzmachine, but his blog remains a leading-edge resource on thought leadership in the digital sphere.

His latest argument involves the case involving theflyonthewall.com and when information gathered by others can be legally redistributed --- the definition of "hot news" in U.S. terms.

Clearly much is at stake for sites that now build upon information gathered elsewhere, with several news organizations attempting to protect their reporting from repurpose. The case is particularly important in an age of technological capacity to scrape and redistribute content without human editing.

The case also tests an old concept in a new era and especially challenges the notion of how much value information has and for how long. Understandably, the largest companies have the most to lose in the legal tussle, as do those who have gathered content and seen it simply redistributed.

In Jarvis' view, the process and structure of news has changed to the point where such protection is no longer relevant. All news is hot news and freedom of speech requires the ability to rework it instantly without reprisal.

He sides with such companies as Google and Yahoo in the case in arguing that protection of such information is irrelevant and futile --- in other words, news cannot be defined by or bottled into a particular span of time. The question in the court, as Howard Weaver points out in a comment to this site, is what if anything should be done about consistent, systematic redistribution.