  Lost in the righteous indignation was the smaller detail,
revealed by Thayer himself, that the editor told him The
Atlantic is not actually opposed to paying its freelancers in
principle. They had just used the budget up and were hoping they
could score a freebie. Tacky? Almost certainly. But three
stories coming out of the Canadian media this week gave me some
perspective on stories like this. Consider:  1. From the
fabulous Michael Geist comes this story about the National Post,
a major Canadian daily, which has apparently signed up with a
‘licensing service’ service called iCopyright. This service has
installed a plugin that issues a pop-up whenever somebody tries
to copy text from an article, prompting them to pay a licensing
fee. Geist points out that one is not legally required to do
this. Copying short excerpts, even for republication, is fair
use under Canadian law. Indeed, the story Geist cites an an
example is itself a column that posts snippets from other media
sources as a sort of daily news rou