First, let me stipulate: City Pages made a great hire when they selected Emily Kaiser to lead their Blotter blog. She's a snappy writer, good reporter (check out this Coleman-Franken ethics interview) and stiff competition for this MinnPost aggregator.

But gosh, does CP still believe in the doctrine of Fair Use?

This morning, Blotter features a rundown of overnight developments in the Coleman DonorGate case. The item contains a link to a story in the D.C. website Politico — cool — followed by 15 of the story's 16 paragraphs.

That's not a boildown, that's not an excerpt, that's ... well, let's just call it uncool. This follows an item last week that reprinted the first nine paragraphs of a 17-graf Nation article.

The implicit tradeoff we story-cullers make is that we repurpose your copy but leave the reader interested enough to send you some life-sustaining hits. Overly long excerpts violate that spirit, if not copyright law.

One can only imagine CP's outrage if someone reprinted 94 percent of their latest hot story, instead of an intriguing summary and link.

Look, I'm happy when Blotter links to me (though I may not be happy next time!) and they've done it responsibly. The section has become more of a necessary read since Kaiser was hired. But a little lighter fingertip on the cut-and-paste won't destroy that, and it will increase the good karma.