For perhaps the first time, a court has established rules about how much a blogger is allowed to lift from the Associated Press or a newspaper. To settle a case brought by the AP and a number of newspapers, a Galveston, Texas blogger has agreed that his Web sites will:

• copy the headline and up to the first two sentences of any stories from the newspapers who had sued him.

• copy headlines and the first paragraph from AP stories provided to them by the news service.

• attribute all stories and include a copyright notice and link to the original work.

Here’s a link to the AP story with the details.