Considering the fact that TechDirt is not responsible for my actions, I hereby provide an AP quote for your amusement. Since they are using a bloggers statements without permission, I feel free to do the same:

Judge’s wife derides media on Web site story

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD

The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

A federal appeals court judge under scrutiny for sexually explicit videos and photos posted on a personal Web site is the victim of distortions and “outright lies” published by the Los Angeles Times, his wife charged Monday.

Marcy Jane Tiffany, wife of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, described some of the material stored on the home computer as raunchy and juvenile. Only a handful of files among hundreds had a “sexual aspect,” but they were not pornography, she said.

“Alex is not into porn he is into funny and sometimes funny has a sexual character,” Tiffany wrote in a nearly 2,000-word defense of her husband, posted on a Web site called patterico.com.

Of the several hundred files in the computer folder at issue, “the vast majority was cute, amusing and not in the least bit sexual in nature,” Tiffany, a Torrance, Calif., lawyer, wrote. “The tiny percentage of the material that was sexual in nature was all of a humorous character.”

The Times account is “riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies,” she said. She also faulted the media for repeating and embellishing what she described as misleading statements in the Times about the material.

The newspaper’s California editor, David Lauter, said in a statement that the articles were fair and accurate and “speak for themselves.”

The stories “raised important issues on a matter of significant public concern,” Lauter said. “The judge was presented with the facts … and was given a full opportunity to respond. We took his responses into account before publication and included what he said in our stories.”

Those articles, Lauter added, “already have dealt with the salient issues.”

Meanwhile Monday, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts named five judges from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Philadelphia, to handle the ethics investigation into the Kozinski’s conduct.

Kozinski called for the probe after news articles about the Web site were published. Separately, Kozinski last week declared a mistrial in an obscenity trial over which he was presiding.

The now-blocked material on the Web site, alex.kozinski.com, included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, and a video of a man being pursued by a sexually aroused donkey. The Times said the site included images of masturbation, and a slide show featuring a striptease with a transsexual.

In a brief telephone interview, Tiffany confirmed the authenticity of the Web statement that appeared under her name. She declined further comment, except to quote the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

“A newspaper … is supposed to be a responsible member of the community, not a predator,” she wrote in the Web statement.

The Times’ stories leave “the impression that Alex was actively aware of all of the material, when, in fact, it had accumulated over a number of years and he didn’t even remember that some of that stuff had been stored there or whether it had been put there by him or one of our sons, who also have access to the server,” she aid.

The video with the man being chased by the donkey is “crude and juvenile, for sure, but not by any stretch of the imagination is it bestiality,” she said. The Times wrote that sexual material on the site was “extensive,” when in fact it was limited to “about a half-dozen items,” she said.

The judge, who has three sons, has said he builds his own computers but told the Times he didn’t know the Web site was accessible to Internet surfers.

In an interview with the Times last week, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his Web site. He defended some of the adult content as “funny,” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate, the newspaper said.

One of his sons, Yale Kozinski, later told The New York Times that the site is registered to him and he maintains it, but neither father nor son made clear who posted the images in question.

Federal rules say judges should “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”

Published: Monday, June 16, 2008 16:35 PDT

There’s a game being played right now… one with smoke and mirrors and slight of hand.

First of all, the AP comes out of nowhere and attacks a single blog.
After allowing enough time for word of this action to spread and create the uproar that followed, the AP switches gears. Now they are the benevolent mega-corpo-media… a misty vision of Miss Congeniality if you will, that wants to write a new set of rules, for them and by them.

Next, they use a group of media bloggers (oxymoron?), the Media Bloggers Association, to create the illusion of genuine negotiations but where the sole effort will be the trashing of the Fair Use Doctrine.

It’s a really grand scheme because if the majority of the blogsphere can be convinced to voluntarily abandon Fair Use in favor of this new matrix, they… the MSM in general, and the AP specifically, will have crippled those hated bloggers.

To combat this effort, bloggers need to reinforce their support for the Fair Use Doctrine and make sure they clearly state that they neither recognize nor support any faux agreement between the AP and the hitherto unknown Media Bloggers Association.

…

The AP should be happy about all the free advertising it’s getting for this flap over “fair use”.
I’m considering a purchase of 5 words right now from the AP.