Is the Associated Press right to go after bloggers?

Eyebrows were raised around the office when we heard about plans from the Associated Press (AP) to start enforcing more rigorous controls over quotations from their news stories. Apparently they objected to the Drudge Retort (a popular left wing version of the Drudge Report) from using quotes from their news material. It asked for five news stories and a user comment to be taken down even though links through to the original source (the AP) were present.
Bloggers it seems are in for a rough ride if they engage in a similar practice.
I have linked to the press release which I assume is safer to quote than the NY Times article by the same author.
Tomorrow, the AP will be meeting Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association in an attempt to agree on a set of workable standards for bloggers to adopt.
From one point of view I can understand where the AP are coming from, they resent that their hard fought for news stories which belong to them and their paying customers are being reproduced for (non-paying) readers of some upstart blog. The bounds of fair use have been stretched too far they argue.
As Bernhard Warner says in his article in the Times Online, "nothing prepared him for the level of theft he would witness daily" when he worked as a reporter for Reuters, "It seemed to be every newspaper" he says that took the content he wrote and repackaged it, often without adequate credit being applied. Have a look at the story he highlights some of the questionable ways how material would be taken, well out of the concept of fair use. On this level I empathise with the AP's position.
But the key point he makes for me is that because the AP don't or can't (?) go for the majors they have instead opted to attack bloggers. This approach seems prehistoric.
IWR and our sister titles often experience similar problems. Sometimes the specialised news we break is also subject to rampant and outright plagiarism from bots and scrapers, but that isn't the same as people quoting us.
Being as balanced as possible, we should consider if a blog (however big or small) is just reporting on the news and giving full credit or are they simply lifting the content wholesale while making a buck out of it?
I hope that tomorrow's discussions remain sensible and the AP rethinks its strategy in trying to put the genie back in the bottle.