The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs

From the New York Times courtesy of Whiskey Fire courtesy of Eschaton:

On Friday, The A.P. issued a statement defending its action, saying it was going to challenge blog postings containing excerpts of A.P. articles “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.” An A.P. spokesman declined Friday to further explain the association’s position.

After that, however, the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard.

“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

And

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.

Click here for the rest.

And click here to see the AP's new standards, per word pricing, for using their work.

Okay, this is slightly disturbing, if only because I rely on the AP, usually by way of the Houston Chronicle, so heavily for my rantings here at Real Art. On the other hand, I'm only getting like 70 hits per day, and more than half of those come from Google image searches, so I'm probably fine as far as being sued goes--I seriously doubt anyone at AP corporate even cares about me, or notices me, for that matter.

Beyond that, however, it's still pretty disturbing. Blogging, on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere, has become a rather important overall forum for national political discussion that did not exist before the internet. That is, political blogging, in its totality, has become a strong enhancement to American democracy, and is therefore quite a good thing. Because bloggers are essentially citizens engaging in debate, and not reporters, they must necessarily rely on actual reporting from bona fide news sources: cutting off such news from the grand discussion would heavily stifle it, thereby hurting American democracy.

That's a bad thing.

And the honchos at the AP must surely know this. But then, the news business, in the end, is a business. Clearly, the bottom line trumps social obligation, which is what's been making the corporate news media suck so much in recent years, anyway. But this is just tacky. No better than the heavy handed tactics of the music industry. Worse, actually, because most illegal music downloading is of Britney Spears and the like, you know, shit music, inconsequential as far as democracy goes; this AP gambit, however, stands to snuff out this relatively new arena for political debate on the internet.

Further, I don't really understand why they think this hurts their bottom line. I've clicked through countless blog posts, myself, to read AP stories in their entirety, which are always surrounded by the advertising that pays their bills. That is, as far as I can tell, bloggers give AP web articles much more exposure than they would have gotten otherwise, and in the internet ad business, that's gold.

My best bet is that, as print journalism continues to go the way of the dinosaur, old school news businessmen are panicking, which is making them do silly shit. Hopefully, this will blow over after a few months and the AP will regain its senses--otherwise, they'll end up being like Scientology, suing everybody they can think of, just because they're crazy and pissed.

No fucking way I'm paying $12.50 to quote five words.

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