The AP has decided, years too late, to try and control the way that bloggers use their content. Specifically they sent a letter to the Drudge Retort over summary quotes from AP articles on their site.1 After some criticism in the Blogosphere, they have pulled back a bit to redefine their policies. On balance, this strikes me as trying to fix the barn door well after the horse has escaped. While I have no problem with the AP trying to protect their legal rights, trying to stop the practice of excerpting by blogs and similar sites strikes me as a foolish attempt that will not only not solve their problem, but lead to a great deal of animosity.
For example, I suspect that a lot of sites will have the same reaction that Michael Arrington had over at TechCrunch:
here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
In some ways this reminds me of the NYT’s attempt to put all their editorial and opinion content behind a pay-for firewall. All that managed to do was take Friedman, Dowd and company out of the conversation.
At the heart of it all is the simple fact that organizations like the AP need to find a way to adapt to the new technological realities rather than falling back on pre-internet paradigms. And really, I have to wonder as to the degree which that blogging in general doesn’t have a net positive effect on readership of AP’s material on AP sanctioned sites.
The NYT reports on the story (The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs) and notes the AP’s current position
Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.
“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with
the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”
I agree that sites shouldn’t cut and paste entire articles (even I have that happen to me sometimes, not to mention people stealing my posts via RSS feed), but sniping portions of an article for quotation is standard practice in all manner of writing so long as attribution is given. I see no reason why bloggers should be limited to summary writing and have to eschew quotations. Further, even if the AP could enforce such a rule, bloggers would simply quote the AFP, Reuters or someone else. All such a policy would create is an AP-less Blogosphere, and I can’t see that helping the AP’s long-term business.
The article continues on the legality of the AP’s position:
Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them. One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.
“The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” said Timothy Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu said that the case is not clear-cut, but he believes that The A.P. is likely to lose a court case to assert a claim on that issue.
“It’s hard to see how the Drudge Retort ‘first few lines’ is a substitute for the story,” Mr. Wu said.
I should reiterate that the AP does have the right to protect their business interests, I just have to wonder if this is the way to do it and I really do wonder if the net effect of blogging on AP revenues is, in fact, negative. Also, I agree that it is possible for a blogger to excessively quote source materials; the question becomes, what constitutes “excessive”? I have had similar thoughts to those of James Joyner:
I’ve worried for years that the lengthy excerpts I use on OTB could be ruled to exceed “fair use” but relied on the notion that I was adding enough commentary to create a transformative work.
It is a reasonable issue, to be sure.
In regards to the AP itself, Jeff Jarvis is right, they come off as not knowing what they are doing:
the agency comes off like a policy ping-pong game, going back and forth: We want to threaten but not to sue, we want to be reasonable but we’re still going to demand that Cadenhead take down excerpts, we don’t know what the hell to do.
Not surprisingly, the story is getting a lot of play in the ‘Sphere: BuzzMachine, Outside The Beltway, Althouse, Macsmind, Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard, Gateway Pundit, Bloggasm, The Strata-Sphere, Joomla! powered Site, Bloggasm and Marc Ambinder
Sphere: Related Content
June 16th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Critics of the Associated Press’ policies are now planning an online boycott of all A.P. stories. While I believe these critics are ultimately correct in their assertions, and their watchdog vigilance serves us all well, such cyberactivists nevertheless ought to realize that, to protect open communication, loud public criticism serves them better than a boycott of the very information they are trying to defend.
http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2008/06/online-boycott-of-associated-press.html
June 16th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
They are afraid of becoming obsolete.
It’s a losing battle, they already are.
June 16th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
[...] oh, that first link was AP (via ESPN). I sure hope I did not quote too much.) [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
I was all set to join the boycott, then I noticed that an ESPN link I made just after checking this blog was actually from AP.
Really, AP is hard to avoid. But it just may be worth the effort.
June 17th, 2008 at 8:04 am
[...] Democracy Forum, Outside The Beltway, Sweetness & Light, Althouse, The Carpetbagger Report, PoliBlog (TM), The Seminal, Concurring Opinions, Hot Air, Fausta’s blog, The Impolitic, The Glittering Eye, [...]