BLACKHEART Cleveland

Travel with me, if you will, to Planet PD - the world where Connie Schultz’s employer gets every single thing she advocated to her US Senator husband in her Sunday column.

To get to this universe, you have to assume that a bill to give news organizations 24 hour exclusivity over information, enforced by federal law, gets to the floor of the House, passes the House, passes the Senate, goes to conference committee, passes again, surviving the inevitable deluge of online advocacy against it, and in a brief moment of insanity suggesting he’s had a lobotomy, gets signed by President Obama. In fact, let’s pretend it happened on Monday, the day after Connie’s column, instead of taking the months to years such things normally take.

Before the ink is dry on the signature, every major internet media company files suit, followed by a coalition of left and right the likes of which not one human has ever imagined - think ACLU and PajamasTV as co-plaintiffs.  The law is enjoined in lieu of litigation that will last several years, winding up in the Supreme Court, while Connie’s job still disappears in the meantime.

BUT WAIT - THIS IS AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.  Can’t we get rid of that, too?  OK, scratch it.

Let’s reprogram our spaceship time travel magic carpet Aladdin’s lamp LSD toadstool to AVOID that entirely, and pretend that all of this actually happened on Monday and NOT ONE PERSON OBJECTS AFTER THE FACT.

In other words, let’s pretend the incentive to contract with newspapers to get license to use their information in the first 24 hours is in place, unchallenged, federally enforceable, and the current state of incentive in the newspaper industry on July 1, 2009.

Who, exactly, is going to enter into those contracts?  Google?  Yahoo?  The Daily Beast?  The Huffington Post?  Some blogger in a basement at his mom’s house?  You get the picture.

So then, the PD has at its disposal a legel remedy!  Off to court we go, to enforce our 24 hour exclusivity.  Uh oh….messy litigation!   Looks like a court’s gonna have to take a careful look at this!  More months and years pass, the PD spending ever more money on litigation, chasing a few pennies from some kid in a basement, and Google.

In this universe, can someone explain to me how the PD still survives by the end of 2009?