Michael Yon is embroiled in an increasingly bitter battle with the US Army over one of his most gripping combat photos. Here is the backstory,

Boston Herald: Blogger battles Army

Michael Yon, a former soldier and an embedded blogger journalist in Iraq, took what some consider one of the more famous photos of the war last May �?? of a U.S. GI cradling a dying Iraqi girl.

The U.S. Army later released the photo, which was flashed around the world and prominently displayed by newspapers, broadcast stations and Web sites.

But Yon, who uses Massachusetts as his blogger base of operations, said he never intended to allow the Army to distribute the photo to commercial operations and he�??s now seeking damages. He said he may file a lawsuit within days, claiming thousands of dollars in damages.

�??I never authorized this distribution and immediately asked the Army to stop it,�?� Yon recently wrote Kennedy, the senior Massachusetts senator and a member of the U.S. Senate�??s Armed Services Committee.

In a written reply to Yon last fall, a U.S. Army attorney countered that Yon had signed a �??hold harmless�?� waiver that absolved the government of responsibility for any �??injury�?? Yon might suffer as an embedded blogger.

The army also said that Yon uploaded his photo onto government computer servers, creating an �??implied license�?� agreement for the Army to distribute the photo.

I’m no Eugene Volokh, and I won’t pretend to understand all of the copyright issues here. But I do know this, no citizen journalist or MSM journalist has done more to give an honest, balanced assessment of the US Army in Iraq than Michael Yon.

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