Here's a neat Slate piece revealing that we have infamous Hollywood screenwriter and fabulist Joe Eszterhas to thank for the SCOTUS' seminal 1974 ruling in Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing.

Fast forward to 2004, blogs, RSS feeds, aggregators, etc.

It's a fairly straightforward issue when a piece that is supposedly a factual account is, in fact, mostly fiction. But it becomes more complicated when a story - moving from machine to machine in the news feeding chain that is the web - changes from factual account to fiction. How will "false light" survive in the digital age? I'm guessing it won't.