Will The A.P. Try To Stop Bloggers From Using Their Content?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, Media, Technology
(AP world headquarters)
A while back, the A.P. targeted a site called the Drudge Retort for using excerpts of its stories on the site. This caused quite an uproar among bloggers because they felt that excerpting portions of a story’s copy was considered “fair use”, and I let my feelings be known as well.
The A.P. subsequently backed off from any legal action and looked a bit silly in the process.
Well, they’re back and now they have their sights set on bigger targets.
Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that Web sites that used the work of news organizations must obtain permission and share revenue with them, and that it would take legal action against those that did not.A.P. executives said they were concerned about a variety of news forums around the Web, including major search engines like Google and Yahoo and aggregators like the Drudge Report that link to news articles, smaller sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole, and companies that sell packaged news feeds.
They said they did not want to stop the appearance of articles around the Web, but to exercise some control over the practice and to profit from it.
Here’s part of the A.P.’s new policy…
As part of the initiative, AP will develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used. AP President Tom Curley said the initiative would also include the development of new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news.
They’ve provided no details apart from that so the implications could be far reaching.
See, a lot of blogging I see these days starts off by reading a story from the mainstream media, excerpting a small portion of it and responding to it. That’s what we do here at Donklephant, with the exception of a few essays and video reports. But, by and large, the business of blogging is about quickly sharing information with our readers and providing commentary along with it.
I try my best to only include the most salient points and I discourage reprinting full articles because that’s clearly not fair use, but it has happened from time to time here. So this site could be in the A.P.’s crosshairs at some point. But we won’t know until they reveal what they do or do not think is fair use.
Now, if the A.P. really cracks down, what will most likely happen is bloggers will stop excerpting their stories and start excerpting somebody else’s. Or they’ll simply rewrite the content they found via an A.P. source. There will probably still be attribution of some sort, but the A.P. runs the risk of losing a lot of links back to its content and thus it could seriously fall in the search engine rankings since one of the ways Google determines authority is the amount of links a certain story gets.
In any event, it’s a slippery slope for them, so I hope they find a common sense way to work with bloggers. Otherwise I guarantee they won’t like the results.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 and is filed under Blogging, Media, Technology. 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.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I have no ads, make no money from my blog. Would they still come after me? I would think it’s fair use?
April 7th, 2009 at 2:08 am
This is silly. It is the information age. Just as much as bloggers depend on the initial reporting and coverage of a variety of breaking issues upon which to provide commentary, juggernauts like AP benefit from the use of blogs, social networking sites, youtube, and a host of other mediums to push their coverage along to a wider audience. They will see the effects if they choose to start making examples of others. No more AP usage for me since they want to act up.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:55 am
This is like the AP is trying to hold back a flood by standing in front of the oncoming deluge holding a hand up and yelling STOP.
I use AP stories occasionally, but there is seldom a need for me to rely solely on them. With Google News I can find multiple sources for the same story in seconds. I always give a link to my sources not matter how much I use, so they certainly aren’t missing out on the credit.
Go ahead AP, tell me I can’t share the news I read from your newsstand. I’ll just go to one of the thousands next door.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Two salient points:
1. If AP and other pro media outfits can’t generate revenue to pay its reporters, everyone will suffer: bloggers, citizens, our culture. I don’t say this to defend the AP’s approach in this particular instance. At the same time, I contend that the failing business model that finances journalism is a problem that will have to be addressed. (So, for example, saying that “this is the information age” doesn’t speak to anything relevant. Not unless you believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.)
2. This approach by AP won’t work. If they focus on protecting their verbatim content, bloggers will stop the practice of quoting excerpts and providing a link. Instead, they will compose their own stories based on a variety of media sources. That’s not very hard to do, will decrease eyeballs to major media sites, and isn’t copyright protected. A place like AP has a copyright on the particular words that they use to describe an event. But they don’t have a copyright on events that have transpired or words that have been spoken by public figures.
If I write a story that says that “AP reports that President Obama said that the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, there’s really not a fricken thing AP can do about it. If bullied on that point, bloggers and other writers can simply recede safely into the paraphrasing weeds.
To the extent that the major media and bloggers have an adversarial relationship, we both fail to see the nature of the problem and find a way to address it. We need a new model that preserves professional reporting as a viable enterprise. Major media must accept even more change. And bloggers must acknowledge that whatever blogging’s merits, there is a parasitical component to blogging which must be refined. If blogging is a parsite that kills its host, where will the new hosts come from? Bloggers must be beneficial parasites that keeps the media honest, clean, and viable.
BTWm IMO, anyone who says that bloggers and citizen journalists can replace the caliber, scope, and breadth of pro journalism is kidding themselves.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:48 am
I agree with everything Kranky Kritter said–while the Internet has allowed us to obtain news quickly and easily, it is killing the source.
No matter how much content they create, blogs and even television news rely on the foot soldiers of news gathering, which is primarily the print journalists and the news services like AP.
To deny this is shortsighted
April 7th, 2009 at 10:01 am
The news gatherers must be paid–there’s no way around this.
Now, here’s a thought…
Singers, musicians, recording artists of all kinds have always been paid by direct sales of their recordings–but there are also organizations like ASCAP and BMI that make some sort of effort to track usage of recorded materials. There was a time when it was pretty commonplace to find an ASCAP sticker on the front window of a business–restaurants, health clubs, book stores–in which recorded music was piped in to enhance this commercial enterprise. The business owners, if I understand, don’t pay on a per-use basis, because that would be too difficult to track; instead, they just pay a “blanket fee” for the license, it allows them to use content to their heart’s desire, and the collected fees are then split up and distributed to recording companies, artists, writers, publishers etc.
Could a similar system work for news content? Bloggers like Justin pay a nominal “licensing fee” up front, and those fees are then split up between AP, UPI, Reuters, and all other news gatherers, and news organizations.
Any thoughts?
Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com
April 7th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Agnostick,
But you can’t have blanket licenses, because the A.P. charges news orgs TONS of money to use their content. And they get to reprint the articles in full, serve ads with it and go on their merry way.
There would have to be a second tier of pricing for using a portion of the content, and it would have to be for everything. But, again, that would be such a slippery slope that the A.P. would have to create some type of auto-check against the content and provide bloggers enough value to jump through those hoops. I don’t personally use their content enough to justify the cost, and I doubt many other bloggers do either.
Another thing, the A.P. is trying to punish those who push traffic back to the news sources that buy their content and that’s just a losing proposition from the start. But hey, they can try. They won’t be happy with the results.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Media will have to reform as smaller, leaner, and more targeted. Much moreso than they want.
Ultimately, the remaining organizations will avoid the level of duplication of effort we still see now. Part-timers and councils of volunteers with narrow passions will fill certain gaps.
Why are there dozens and dozens of people at political press conferences and in sports press boxes? This expensive physical presence affords us what, exactly? Why is a TV reporter standing outside of a dark empty courtroom for the 1104 pm news segment on the latest trial?
And likely, good content will start to cost something. How come the WSJ has managed not to give its product away for free?
Oh, one more thing. Don’t pretend to be shocked by THIS inevitable development which may act as a partial financing vehicle. Wait for it. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. OK. Ready?
internet usage taxes.
BTW, not advocating. merely predicting.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Let’s be honest. The AP was targeting The Drudge Report because it’s been scooped by him a few times. It just seems like kind of a personal vendetta to me.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:26 am
No, not the Drudge Report, the Drudge ReTort. It was a smaller liberal site that’s an answer to the Drudge Report.
To be fair to the real Drudge, all they ever do is link out to stories. Every now and again they’ll have an “exclusive” but it has been a LONG time since their last one.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:53 am
AP is having its own problems with many of its subscribers — mostly local daily newspapers and TV stations — falling on hard times and pressuring AP to cut the cost of its “wire.” Some subscribers have been forced to withdraw. Meanwhile, Big Web sites like HP and various aggregators are literally mooching off AP copy that costs hundreds of of millions of dollars to create — and turning a nice profit in the bargain.
There are only a couple of dozen significant US news gathering organizations that operate nationally and/or internationally: the TV and cable networks, the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LAT (so far), AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, NPR, and so on. Of these, the print outfits do by far the lion;s share of collecting. Recently, Michael Kinsley wisecracked that if the NYT disappeared, there would still be news, so presumably someone would cover it. Maybe so, but it would cost a lot of money — a whole lot more than Huffington, Slate, Salon, Drudge, RedState, TPM, Politico, Memeorandum and other larger websites’ budgets put together.
There are a lot of ways to structure a system of reasonable payment. Huffington can subscribe to AP, just as the Hartford Courant does. Smaller sites can pay a flat fee, based on traffic. Perhaps Google and other providers of publishing tools can foot the bill for the thousands of small bloggers and pass part of the cost through by taking it off the top of ad revenue. There’s a way. To ignore the issue and complain that the Internet deserves to be free won’t cut it. Unlike music, TV and film producers who arguably gain over time through the exposure of their products to unlimited audiences, AP’s content and that of other news organizations has virtually no value beyond the moment of its delivery — because it’s NEWS.