  We study the free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair at finite
temperature in three flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses using N_tau=4 and
6 lattices with Asqtad staggered fermion action. The static free energy was
calculated for different values of the quark mass and the entropy contribution
at large distances has been extracted. We also calculate the renormalized
Polyakov loop following the approach by Kaczmarek et al.
