The Associated Press Declares War on the Online World
My beloved, eternally bumbling Chicago Cubs swept the even lowlier Washington Nationals in a three-game mid-July series. I read that in an Associated Press report headlined “Big 4th inning gives Cubs sweep of Nationals.”
Will reporting this result to readers get me in trouble someday soon?
That result isn’t as far-fetched as you might think.
On July 23, the AP, that empire of alleged journalism that characterizes itself as “The Essential Global News Network,” signaled its intention to fundamentally change its relationship with the rest of the online world:
As part of a strategy approved Thursday by the AP’s board, the cooperative will start by bundling its text stories in an “informational wrapper” that will include a built-in beacon to monitor where stories go on the Internet.
The beacon is meant to be a policing device aimed at deterring websites from posting AP content without paying licensing fees. The AP and its member newspapers contend unlicensed use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential ad revenue. …
“This is a pivotal step in the fight to ensure that quality journalism can be funded in the digital era,” Tom Curley, AP’s chief executive, said in an interview. “We have stood by too long and watched other people make money off the hard work of our journalists. We have decided to draw a line in concrete.”
The wire service expects to roll out the “informational wrapper” in stages beginning in November.
AP’s press release is troubling enough, but in a related New York Times interview that day with Richard Perez-Peña, AP’s Curley added this:
The company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. … He specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.
Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, “That’s right.”
While AP’s aggressive posture is of course largely about money, it is also about control, accountability, and thin-skinned resistance to criticism. The only thing up for debate is the relative importance of each factor.
Of course, the money involved is a big deal. In its press release, AP cites a roughly 6.5% drop in revenue in 2008 from $748 million to $700 million. It expects another drop in 2009 because of reductions in fees charged to newspapers and broadcasters.
The wire service should consider itself lucky, because it is. While AP’s revenue declines are only a bit less than those seen at larger subscribing outlets such as the New York Times (down 7.6% in 2008) and Gannett (down 9%), problems further down the newspaper food chain are clearly much more serious. Click on the “Quarterly” tab at this Newspaper Association of America link (HT: Newsosaur), and you’ll see that total print advertising revenues in the first quarter of 2009 ($5.923 billion) were 36% lower than 1Q08 ($9.296 billion) and a shocking 55% lower than 1Q06 ($13.245 billion). In that context, it would seem that AP’s price breaks are nowhere near what its subscribers need to survive.
In fact, AP’s relative strength, and its ability to limit its fee reductions to far less than the revenue hits its subscribers are taking, are a result of its dominant, near-monopoly market position. Because of the steep decline in available resources and a worse crash in credibility during the past decade at the New York Times, AP reports now probably form the basis for the vast majority of most newspapers’ national news and a high plurality of their international news. AP reports very often serve as the starting point for top- and bottom-of-hour radio newscasts, and more than likely drive a large portion of the content of television news shows and newscasts. For breaking daily business news, the nation, heaven help us, is largely at AP’s mercy, where the economic narrative shaped by its fundamentally weak and insufferably biased reporters seems to insinuate itself everywhere.
Though the wire service has content licensing agreements with the major search engines and some aggregators, it currently only gains financially when visitors click through to AP or a subscribing affiliate. That’s not enough for Curley & Co. They want to get credit when a user only lands on the page containing a related search engine listing or, as noted above, arrives at a page with a mere headline — even if the user never actually looks at it.
In taking this position, the AP and Curley apparently believe that megasites like Matt Drudge, whose every linked headline drives hundreds of thousands if not occasionally millions of readers to their related stories, and who on his own provides ten links to the wire service that are visible 24-7-365, should be paying AP for the “privilege” of beefing up AP’s and its subscribers’ traffic, and even for every user who visits him. Charging Drudge, or a search engine, or anyone else, for a user who doesn’t click through is like making a store pay a nickel for every customer who walks by the newspaper rack, whether or not they even look, let alone buy.
Beyond that, AP seems to believe that blogs, forums, and other online outlets that link and excerpt its material (perhaps even emailers, texters, and Twitterers?) have no right to do so without compensating AP.
Of course, the AP’s position is economically ignorant, at least in the short term. There will be pushback from those who will refuse to link to AP. Others will likely figure out how to disable the wrapper, while still others will resort to likely wrapper-proof screen shots and area grabs.
If Curley & Co. were consistent, they would prevent web crawlers from indexing the wire service’s content. But that would require them to build a web business on their own. Fat chance of that.
AP’s astounding arrogance is intensely galling. These control freaks seem to believe that they not only own the news, but also that the news is only what they say it is and that you have to come to them to get it — or otherwise pay for the privilege.
Not so, guys. Of course, you own your content. Obviously, your content ownership proscribes outright pilferage. But in a free society, ownership of news content also comes with responsibilities. Those responsibilities include permitting the quality of your content to be critiqued, allowing your alleged facts and claims to be disputed and expanded upon, and putting up with documented criticisms of possibly biased reporting, along with the exposure of the possible sources of those biases. It also should allow readers to question why the tone of the stories changes in mid-stream, as exemplified by the headline change this past weekend in the Obama-Gates-Crowley affair even though there were no new story developments during the intervening period:
Curley & Co. do not recognize the legitimacy of what normal people refer to as “fair use” and are in fact seeking to narrow its scope to near nothingness.
Last year, AP’s legal bullies went after a leftist critique site called the Drudge Retort, telling it that even an excerpt as short as 33 words “does not fall within the parameters of fair use.” Though Curley would not discuss fair use with the Times, it’s clear that demanding money for listing mere headlines is a quantum leap beyond last year’s widely ridiculed exercise.
It would be one thing if there was anything resembling reciprocity, but the fact is that AP frequently scrapes news from blogs, and even its subscribers, without attribution. One small example: In the fall of 2007, yours truly and fellow PJMer Patrick Poole exposed the terror-sympathetic background of a Muslim cleric who was about to begin serving as imam at a Cleveland mosque. When the imam “resigned” before he even started and blamed “bloggers” for his demise, the AP parroted his whining and refused to name either of us. For that matter, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for whom I was actually blogging at the time, also mostly ignored us. This is the same Plain Dealer whose “readers representative” recently stooped to calling bloggers “pipsqueaks.”
But credit, like content, is a one-way street in AP-land. As far as it’s concerned, once their reporters type it, they have absolute control over it and you can’t have any of it, even for perfectly legal reasons — unless you pay their toll. Do not rule out the possibility, especially given who is in charge in Washington, that they might succeed. Meanwhile, at least you’re reasonably up to date on how the Cubs are faring.
Oh, yeah, it’s gone way up the absurd scale over last time based on your saying that about the headlines use.. Twitter was the first thing I thought of, too, as I have become more active highlighting news and links there lately.. Matter of fact in the last couple of days, I’ve also referenced AP for at least a couple of stories on my (recently revised but now soon to be defunct???) Delicious account..
When this came up before, it was beyond me that there couldn’t be a nice new startup to gave them what-fer.. Someone please remind me again why that can’t happen..?
They do not own the news, end of discussion, but I do remember some messed up reason, their rationale, that certainly made it seem like they did the last go-round.. Can still remember thinking then that they made it look like they could lock it down so badly “news” without them could only legally be something resembling that Andy Griffith Show episode where Opie and his buddy start their own newspaper full of pretty much nothing but overheard gossip…….
Very interesting and the logic is easy to follow. If AP and the New York Times can charge,the reverse should also be true. They should pay for stories and use of information they lift from the internet and local newspapers. It won’t be a one-way street as they envisiion.
Also a heavy-handed crackdown by the AP will bred strong competition from web sources which the AP would have to pay for using. This would be a good thing in that it would offer a larger variety of views and opinions.
Dan Rather
I agree with Dan-
the government should take over the media.
No wait-
Didn’t they already take over the media?
Sorry-
I’m confused.
‘insufferably biased reporters’ says it all. I avoid AP bylined reporting.
“the money involved s a big deal” and “insufferably biased reporters”
The internet is the only thing that helps keep these people in check.
A question for Dangerous Dan. How exactly can one tell if the government has taken over the media or if the media has taken over the government?
yeah right AP is gonna beat all the bloggers at their game, LOL, too funny. When will they wake up and realize that we all know they are simply liars who only print stories that follow their plot lines.
Don’t forget Torrent!
Don’t forget Torrent!
There will be news producing Torrents – don’t worry!
There will be code cracking Warez – don’t worry!
http://www.bugmenot.com/
All these Dan Ratheristas are old eggheads thinking that they are the ones who are blowing the Trade Winds from their mouth.
AP needs to protect its intellectual property so it can afford to report the news. You get what you pay for.
I believe we’re all familiar with the low-quality reporting of “citizen journalists” who give it away for free.
This is the free-market, laissez-faire capitalism you conservatives wanted, and now you got it. Enjoy.
I do not believe it is “altruism” that drives the AP.
AP seems to have missed that fact that there are thousands of other news sources besides theirs. I consider an AP byline to be a negative, not a positive in selecting a story to read. They are welcome to charge what they think the market will bear. The vastness of the web and willingness of others to generate content at least equal to and probably better than AP’s ensures that they will wither on their particular thread of the the world wide web.
And to Mike W.: I’ll take free-market, laissez-faire capitalism over Obama socialism and liberal Big Brotherism any day. At least with capitalism I have a choice.
Quite simply, what makes America a true beacon of freedom is the freedom of the Press and the military personnel who live and die for this freedom. The bias reporting and the onslaught of negatives against McCain and the Republicans was proof enough of the power of the written word. Thank God for the internet. I will make my own choices, thank you very much.
13. karlinsync: “Thank God for the internet. I will make my own choices, thank you very much.”
No, thank the federal government for the Internet. Without government investment in new technologies such as the Internet and personal computer, you’d still be banging rocks together.
Oh Dear, How will I live without my trusty AP computer generated news lines????? I hope the beacon doesn’t pop up on my website and report me to the News Sheriff
NONSENSE!
In 100 years historians and schoolchildren are going to regard DRM the same way we look at bloodletting as medicine. If you can read information then you can copy it. It’s really that simple, the only way to stop information from being copied is to make it unreadable. This “beacon” will be cracked on the first day. By day 10 there will be a plugin for Firefox that strips it out automatically. I don’t buy into the whole “information wants to be free” hacker ethos but I do know that there is a horde of sweaty, basement dwelling nerds out there who do. They’ve got nothing better to do than make the AP look stupid.
Mike W, you haven’t got a clue about how the world works. Not a clue.
Stay in your mom’s basement playing your video games, and fantasize that the government is the answer to your problems.
AP….don’t read them now…used to…until i “caught on” to their left leaning logic(illogic)uva65
AP’s strategy cannot last indefinitely…there’s no way this restricive a notion withstands Fair Use scrutiny. Of course, they’ll be able to crush some small folks until that happens and make a bit of money, I suppose.
Mike W, If we are going to go that far, thank the military-industrial complex and the Soviet Union. For without them, the internet and personal computers would be slow in coming. The federal government would still be using pen and ink if it weren’t for the need to meet military threats.
How about a month long AP fast? Just stop all their prohibited use for all their controlled content for a month. Then see how happy they are about their new content control system. Google could kill it in a week by just writing instructions to ignore any AP protected content during their web crawls for a week.
17…feeding the troll….it makes him more important in his own mind…
“I believe we’re all familiar with the low-quality reporting of “citizen journalists” who give it away for free.”
Like that idiot Dan Rather.
“ Without government investment in new technologies such as the Internet and personal computer, you’d still be banging rocks together.”
Because we all know that only DARPA has ever invested a dime in the future. If they didn’t have “D*f*ns*” in their name, they’d be almost as cool as ACORN.
Mike W is on one those tears we hear time to time. No, the feds had nothing to do with the PC. First, there was the Altair (as I recall) and then Intel came out with 8080 chip. Apple created their computer with no federal help and IBM, using the 8088 chip, created theirs without any federal help.
True, DARPA did fund a project to communicate between universities and research facilities. It provided three applications: telnet, file transfer, and mail. We have grown a long way since then without government funding and research.
Rick
You can bet the politicans and other public figures won’t be speaking to AP outlets if they know their remarks won’t be picked up by blogs and web sites. On the other hand, AP will be the equivalent of releasing a story the Friday before a 3-day weekend – you can say you informed the citizenry while being sure no one read the bad news.
A wire service declaring war on the Online? So is this ironic or just weird?
What’s a wire service if not a primitive ‘net? Add some graphics and voila…the web!
It’s almost as history/technology deaf as Journalists ragging on bloggers….web loggers…web journals….um where did they think the journal part of journalist came from anyway?
I guess its easier/clearer if we just call them rags and leave it there.
Criticism of the AP simply sends more readers their way, which AP clearly doesn’t understand. Criticizing them only indicates they are relevant.
If I had a blog, I’d simply ignore their product – no links or references to the inaccurate and biased crap they produce.
I’d also turn the tables on them, copyright everything I wrote, and state on my blog that news organizations can use my stuff only with the express written permission of the author and must explictly reference the author and the blog.
The new service is going to be called APSelect. The AP will learn the same lesson the Times did, only two years later. How brilliant is that?
“No, thank the federal government for the Internet. Without government investment in new technologies such as the Internet and personal computer”
No, thank the military, the one government agency idiot liberals complain is a waste of tax payer dollars when it really is both the most productive and only effective branch of government. The interent is the child of DARPA. And without the military, specifically SAC and the ICBM, computers would not have gone very far.
i’m in ur innertube, yoinking ur stuff. lolz.
If AP wants to kill their news model altogether, this is the way to do it. Journalists out of a job will find a way to report and make a living online, probably for an online news conglomerate, and AP will continue to decline until it sinks, silent and lonely, thus joining the genteel gray corpse of the New York Times at the bottom.
Why stop there? Thank Sir Albert of Gore (pbuh) of Nobel and Peace. He sat down for years in his basement of massive carbon footprint, and invented the web. I’m just not sure if he did the fiber optic web or the hemp web (I mean, how on earth does one manage to use that much electricity, unless he’s growing something?).
“ Without government investment in new technologies such as the Internet and personal computer, you’d still be banging rocks together.”
The funny thing is that Mike W doesn’t realize these projects were developed mostly for military/defense purposes.
Things that – ahem – conservatives are perfectly happy funding. Unlike, say, Obama and his followers.
In their topsy-turvy world – one where the single most important thing is their own precious, small identity – they can’t understand when collective action is valuable and virtuous and when it’s not.
Take the military – or fighting epidemics. Until I can figure out how to make the nukes and F-22s protect me and not leftists, we’re all in national defense together. We might not like what it’s doing sometimes, but the principle is pretty clad. Until I can make smallpox or H1N1* stop at my lungs, we’re in epidemics together.
But somebody else’ irresponsibility, and therefore “need” to get an abortion, or their unwillingness to do whatever is absolutely necessary and legal to better their own life and get out of poverty is NOT a collective problem. It’s an individual one. Like educating your children, providing for your healthcare or your retirement. But to these guys, THOSE are the things that require collectivism. It’s almost as if their primary concern was exerting power over other people while congratulating themselves for it.
Breathtaking in its intellectual dishonesty.
*Speaking of H1N1, won’t it be pretty, that while the Messiah-King is struggling his hardest to conscript everyone into his Marxist healthcare program, we may be losing the fight against an H1N1 epidemic. I suppose that will obviate the healthcare cost debate. And the Social Security question.
So regarding this AP beacon thing to track usage …
Can’t you just right click, copy, paste? And screw the AP?
Like the NY Times this could not have been happening
to a more lovable bunch of biased people.
FU AP
Fair enough. As long as AP pays royalties to anyone and everyone they quote.
Sorry, that pic of the rally? You can’t use it AP. See, thats me in the right hand corner. $20,000 please.
Idiots.
Amos, the reason for this is that Liberalism cannot sustain itself. They need the collective to survive and this points to one reason why they attack the family. A conservative person will work to provide for himself and for his family. A liberal person will not and so they must destroy the nuclear family and make the whole world part of the family so that then, they may reap the benefit of work from the conservative. If we were still banging rocks together, as Mike W puts it, there would be no liberalism because those people would either starve or be clubbed to death as would be necessary for both individuals and the community to survive. This is also why they are opposed to capitalism because ther is no room for dead weight.
This is beautiful. Lets say that judges freiendly to the leftwing statists shrink the fair use doctrine per AP’s desire (without that AP’s whole concept falls flat anyway). Electronically defeating their tracking flag is a no-no under the digital millenium copyright act, so that won’t happen on a large scale. Drudge & the rest of the blogosphere will simply avoid linking to AP-byline stories and instead use Reuters and other non-AP sources. Click throughs to AP-subscriber papers drops off a cliff of course, since cross-linking is what drives nearly all internet-news viewers to various sites. Those papers are the ones paying AP’s bills, and their physical circulation ain’t going up to cover that online loss. Reuters, being less boneheaded than AP, sits on the legal sidelines to see how things play out. Reuters stories get all the traffic that used to go to AP’s via linking, and Reuter’s subscribers see click-throughs to them rise. Yeah, good strategy AP. Their board must be packed with spouses of politicians.
AP go jump in the lake !!!! Who needs you ??
Well, we now know what Tom Curley thinks. I’m wondering what Bob Moe, and Jim Larry would have to say.
Sorry, but they’re going to win this one.
1) Justice will do what the White House tells them to…remember the weapon-wielding ACORN thugs blocking the entrance to a voting place…no problem according to the Justice (for Obama) Department.
2) Obama cannot afford to NOT do what the media tells him to do. He’s dropping like a rock despite the nauseating media bias…imagine if the media decided to be unbiased. Dan Rather and AP have an offer Obama cannot refuse…he’ll instruct Justice to do what they say.
3) A few people will actively avoid AP stories, but you are a tiny, tiny minority. Most people will not know or care about AP. They just turn on the tube and accept what they are told. They will never notice whether it’s AP or not.
4) All you brave “I’ll copy/paste and they can’t stop me” bloggers will change your tune when the summons arrives, and you realize you’ll have to mortgage your house just to hire 10% of their lawyer-power.
You’ll cave.
The conclusion is that no News Aggregating Agency has an exclusive access to world events because there are millions of other informants, private or foreign, locals etc. with even better access or means to those events, like Michael Yon’s pictorial war reports.
There are no lasting secrets on the world scene except for the Kenyan Wonder-boy personal records.
AP, NYT, all can stuff it.
Methinks they’re desperate for bucks. So AP, how’s that hope and change working for your bottom line? gotta come up with new ways to generate money? must be getting desperate.
@Cow Rie. Yes, you’re right. The technobabble from the AP announcement makes it sound like a lot more than it really is. Looks like this is just another formatting specification that can contain some embedded code, pretty much like what HTML, Javascript, etc. do now. So a copy-paste to notepad or something else will just pick up the text and not the underlying source.
This is basically just to stop people from embedding their raw news feeds, as far as I can tell, which they have a perfect right to do. But it doesn’t stop fair-use copying of excerpts from their stories.
Rich:
“FU AP”
FU AP
Poor, poor AP, the locals that get material from them just suffer terribly having to pay for it. Now these local newspapers that are decrying the loss of ad revenue, shall we count the wheres of their MAJOR advertisers, what happened them? Subscriptions per se don’t generate that much income for a paper – total subscribers determine what the paper can charge as an advertising rate to merchants. So, where are the merchants?
dealer advertising – obummer has taken over two American car companies, and closed hundreds of dealerships that “used” to advertise in newspapers. used car ads are on increasingly on craigslist, as the consumer would rather go there than get ink all over their hands trying to find something on a paper they have to get rid of when they’re done.
real estate lisitings – housing debacle of Fannie and Freddie (the dem’s wanted bank to give loans to people who couldn’t qualify – as the saying goes: be careful what you wish for, you may get it. Or: you reap what you sow.) has glutted the markets with houses that are worth less than a year ago. If people aren’t buying, sellers can’t sell an already reduced value property, and REAgents are blowing money they won’t recoup to place ads. (in a true hoist by his own petard moment – geitner sold his house at a loss. I just hope he had to eat it rather than feed it to the American taxpayer.)
Employer’s looking to hire new employees – need I say more? what jobs there are are advertised on craigslist, monster, etc. etc. – places job seekers *actually* visit.
Classifieds – craigslist. that’s some SF (profiling location he’s probably liberal) techie creating a mostly free bb/classifieds. they have significantly made a dent in newspaper ad revenue.
How many small retail are following with reduced advertising, or just plain going out of business because obummer is killing small business? How many major retail chains are closing stores? closed retail do not advertise.
Those are the major sources of revenue for newspapers, with which they send to AP/Gannet/etc to buy copy to fill their pages. But of course, they never talk about that.
perhaps the AP should be talking to the dem’s about reversing some of their policies as those are contributing factors in the local’s cage liners hurting in the revenue dept.
AP: Free Press delenda est
Did I paraphrase far enough to avoid a lawsuit ?
The entertainment enforcers of DRM are after money;
I suspect the MSM news spinners, and their masters,
want control.
Q: If a low quality citizen journalist is standing
next to a paid professional, and they document
the same event, can the PP sue the CJ for theft ?
No ? How about if the CJ follows the PP to the scene ?
Digression on enabling tchnology:
Guys, Gals, find out the facts on PCs and the Net;
The truth is stranger than the fiction, and more
useful in predicting the future of Tech.
Lastly, Everything Old is New again, per Heinlein:
“In the course of a long life, there have been ten
occasions when I was on the scene of a story later
reported by XXXXXXX magazine, and _not_once_ did
what they wrote match what I saw.”
#39 Bob. They will lose if they win this one. AP is irrelevant at this point. You can’t trust their “news” product and it turns out that most everything they “report” actually comes from press releases, press conferences — very little is real reporting. The bias in the “reporting” is astounding, remember the photos of Beirut that had all the photoshopped smoke??
Who watches television news anymore? Hint: all the ads are for Geritol and adult panties. That audience will literally be dead in 20 years, sooner if Obamacare passes.
Who reads a newspaper anymore? From their sales figures, they are on death’s door, too. Newspaper news stopped being worthwhile when you had checked the news online, then opened a paper and realized that everything in print was 12-24 hours behind reality.
The internet is the natural place for people to get news. No one is going to link to AP if they are going to get sued, so they’ll get no traffic. They are going to die from “who cares”.
16. Paul in MI:
I do know that there is a horde of sweaty, basement dwelling nerds out there who do. They’ve got nothing better to do than make the AP look stupid.
~~~
That’s not much of a challenge for them.
37. Rob:
If we were still banging rocks together, as Mike W puts it, there would be no liberalism because those people would either starve or be clubbed to death as would be necessary for both individuals and the community to survive.
~~~~
Have you noticed that liberals are the most opposed to the natural outcome of Darwin’s theory?
BLOGGERS: How about forming a group to police AP? Hire a REALLY, REALLY HIGH PRICED LAWYER to sue AP every time a member blogger’s information is even remotely mentioned in AP.
READERS: CANCEL local newspaper immediately. Half their content is AP. See if AP notices that we won’t pay to read their propaganda.
Subscribe to PJTV. Much more entertaining and TRUTHFUL and ACCURATE.
SMALL BUSINESS OWNER: Run to the web as fast as you can – forget paper advertising.
As a long-time APer (I left in the 1990s for better things and more money), let me offer some perspective:
1) For those of you who don’t know, the AP is a not-for-profit cooperative (it’s owned by its members). You join the AP, which offers a variety of levels of service to newspapers, radio/TV outlets and online services. If you’re a member, the AP can use anything you produce, though it must be credited.
2) The AP was late to the Internet and has never really figured it out. Obviously, if management is trying to drive away viewers and traffic, it still hasn’t. The one thing the Information Age did do was give a lot of older writers who were stuck there a chance to leave — more media jobs equaled more opportunities, at least for a while.
3) Curley is the first non-AP outsider to run the organization. He’s done his best to drive away a lot of the older personnel (they cost too much) and bring in younger, cheaper writers (especially in NYC and DC, the real power points of the AP). Most of the “kids” have a sense of entitlement and a perspective on politics that’s far to the left of most of the US — but right in synch with the Obana-kissing MSM.
4) The AP used to be the “Joe Friday of journalism” — just the facts. Any opinion/analysis was clearly labeled. “accountability journalism” seems more like another term for “biased reporting.”
5) I learned a lot at the AP — good writing and reporting, getting the facts right, dealing with tight deadlines (at the AP, there’s always someone looking for the story you’re writing or editing). I still have friends there, many of whom are aghast at what they see going on.
6) The AP is losing newspaper members, both from the demise of some papers and from outlets who think it costs too much. Other users are downsizing their services, cutting back or using less-comprehensive but cheaper ones. Management is desperate to replace that revenue and obviously thinks this is the way to do it. Let them try.
Daily Pundit has been boycotting AP stories for years now. Haven’t noticed any decline in the ability to comment on whatever I wish. Reuters, Xin Hua, AFP, local reporting, all sorts of other bloggers and websites….
AP will fail, right along with their Anointed President.
“AP needs to protect its intellectual property so it can afford to report the news. You get what you pay for.”
AP needs to pay for what it steals too. If AP quotes tweeters and bloggers it needs to pay them for their products. It does not pay them. It also does not pays Iranians for stealing their videos. If AP wants people to pay for their work they should pay for what they take from others.
As Mike W said – you need to pay for what you use. It applies to everybody, AP included.
My blog will link to whatever AP story we wish to, unless it is locked behind a password protected barrier, and add our own comments to that news… and under UK law that is legal “fair use” and if AP wishes to take me to court in the UK, I am totally happy to oblige them. They will lose and, this being the UK, they will the also therefore end up paying my legal costs, not to mention doing wonders for my blog’s readership numbers. Please PLEASE start sending me threatening letters AP. In fact I am now more motivated than even to link the hell out of anything interesting AP does.
Hot damn! Now I can get my blatantly-left-slanted news reports in a special “copyright-safe” package! Thank you AP, for saving me from the terrible blogosphere.
If the AP wants paid badly enough to try and keep “their news” out of the public domain, then I think we should pay them. With as little attention and respect as possible.
What is happening at the AP, NYT, network news, etc., is free market culling at its best. Trouble is (as suggested in the article) the administration means to quell the free market. Upholding the hopeless; supporting the unsupportable.
Shouldn’t the AP have to pay for the news that they report as they are using the people within their news articles to generate income? The people used in their news stories should be compensated for creating the news that the AP reports. In the light of what the AP intends to do, this sounds fair to me.
Doesn’t it come down to property rights and whether or not you believe in them? The AP thinks they have something valuable, and worth revenue and therefore worth defending. I think the fact that much newspaper coverage is actually rehashed (or just reprinted) AP reports is exactly the point. They charge their clients for any use of their written material, and want to assert their right to do the same to anyone else who uses their content (property). That so many here find the property for sale worthless is beside the point. If you think it worthless, then don’t buy it. But as in any other commercial transaction, if you don’t pay for the product, you don’t get to use it.
I know the argument is that “information wants to be free” and “once you give it to the people for free (the way newspapers have on the web) no one will want to pay for it.” Maybe. But xeroxing was a verb until Xerox fought to protect their property– the name of their brand. Now everybody photocopies. Just because AP didn’t defend their property from the get-go doesn’t mean that they abrogated the right to ever do so. And maybe web-based competitors will arise who will do the leg work on the ground to generate the stories. It would be all to the good if they did.
News isn’t property– so go to the ball game or to an event and write up your version. And you can generate your own property after reading an AP story– you just can’t copy and paste any part of it. Fair use is a complex concept– it’s not as simple as saying it’s fair use so long as it’s less than 10% (or whatever) of the piece. That said, I don’t know if the AP’s latest salvo would stand up to a court challenge.
AND TO BE CLEAR– property rights cut BOTH ways. If bloggers content/property is stolen by the AP, then the bloggers have the right to defend their rights. Every blogger should have a linking and copying policy published on their site– with one in place, if the AP (or anyone else) violates it, you can at the very least send a threatening letter.
I was of the opinion that as long as the source is credited, any public use copyrighted materiel is allowed. Since this is established case law, for AP to do otherwise would require the Law to be changed. The new law would be challenged, which would open up a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Back where the rubber meets the road, the AP is losing money. They think that this measure will stop that. It won’t.
As a practical point, the people AP will sue have no money.
One assumes their attorneys pointed this out, which means this move is about intimidation.
It looks like they are going with the Microsucks business model. Fear, Uncertainity, Doubt. FUD.
#60, that’s also the Obama Economy model.
14. Mike W “No, thank the federal government for the Internet. Without government investment in new technologies such as the Internet and personal computer, you’d still be banging rocks together”
You’re right!! I think Al Gore invented the internet
#60, that is NOT established case law. You cannot simply copy someone else’s work and get around the copyright law by crediting the source. Here is the best explanation of which I’m aware: http://malor.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/what-bloggers-should-know-about-copyright-and-fair-use/ . Gabriel Malor wrote it after a request from Brian Ledbetter, who has written here at PJM about his own battles over copyright and fair use rules.
No laws need to be changed for the AP to protect its written or photographed property.
You’ll cave.
Wanna bet?