Why I Won’t Pay The AP One Red Cent
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, Law, MediaRecently, the AP decided to get all legal on the bloggers over at The Drudge Retort and demanded that content containing AP reporting be taking down, citing Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The content in question ranged from between 17 and 79 words (yes, that’s it), and the AP apparently thinks the The Drudge Retort’s posts violated their copyright. Not only that, they wanted something a commenter had posted taken down. Yes, a commenter who had quoted an AP story.
Obviously, this has caused an uproar in the blogosphere about whether or not quoting pieces of other people’s content and then citing where you got it is indeed “fair use.” And guess which side bloggers are coming down on.
The AP recognized they may have been a little hasty to get legal and decided to regroup and offered a way for bloggers to excerpt content and pay for it.
Here are the terms…
That’s right. If you want to use 5 words from the AP, you have to pay $12.50.
So then…since I excerpt content from the AP on a near daily basis at Donklephant, I’m left with two choices:
- Don’t ever excerpt any content from the AP because there’s no way I’d ever be able to pay their fees.
- Completely ignore them.
I’m going with choice #2. Here’s why…
First, it’s a complete perversion of the fair use laws to suggest that quoting more than 4 words violates copyright, and AP should know better.
Second, bloggers help AP’s content by quoting it, citing it, linking to it and consequently helping it rise further up in search results. Because what this ultimately does is sends more traffic to their stories…which they can then make more ad dollars off of.
Third, the sooner the AP realizes this, they better. Consider my decision as a way of helping the AP get with reality sooner rather than later. And if the entire blogosphere follows suit, there’s absolutely no way they can sue us all.
So there you have it. We’re all outlaws now. Get your guns and let’s ride.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 and is filed under Blogging, Law, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
The AP had better hope it doesn’t prevail with this idiocy. Because, if it does prevail, in very short order some AP member news organization is going to quote from a blog, and the wire service is going to pick up and disseminate the story. Then, the blogger whose work was quoted is going to slap the AP with a big, fat fee — and the threat of a lawsuit if the fee isn’t paid.
Never mind having to defend the lawsuit. Having been hoist on its own petard, the AP is going to come off looking so pathetically lame its executives are going to wish they had never started this.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Ef the AP. This is complete BS. Good for you Justin.
June 17th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
[...] Hot Air (Says it better than moi — and that’s sayin’ somethin’); Donklephant; Little Green Footballs; Hot Air; Comments From Left Field; The Impolitic (Libby Spencer); The [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 8:36 am
[...] Gardner, for example, has joined the crowd of those who will not link to another Associated Press article if the present p… First, it’s a complete perversion of the fair use laws to suggest that quoting more than 4 words [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I agree with the spirit of your notion of completely ignoring the AP. However, the fact that you’ve bothered with this post will make that a difficult story to tell if they try to hassle you.
Nevertheless, I think you’re on solid ground so long as you make can make a continually demonstrable good faith effort to follow a serious working definition of what constitutes fair use. That would mean keeping your verbatim excerpts to 2 or 3 paragraphs, even when 4 or 5 seems tasty.
It would also mean taking the time to write summaries and paraphrases in order to avoid breaking the bounds of fair use propriety. When you do this, the AP is immediately cast on far shakier ground.
Showing that you have a reasonable policy and that you follow it seriously is a very good defense. At the very least, it would encourage the AP to chase after someone they think they can bully with their new policy, which does NOT accord with established protocol. And make no mistake, that’s how big orgs can operate, by using lawyers to bully bit players.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:36 am
the AP is so hypocritical. Journalists and bloggers have had their stuff “excerpted” and lifted by AP reporters all the time.
I guess the AP feels that it is somehow special and the laws, and their own practices don’t apply to them.
Shame Shame Shame