Posted on 06/17/2008 4:00:27 PM PDT by Anti-Bubba182
The Associated Press is trying to back out of an Old Media-New Media fight that it didn’t quite mean to pick.
The 162-year-old news service will sit down with representatives of a bloggers group Thursday to devise guidelines allowing Internet commentators to use excerpts from AP stories and broadcasts.
The AP provoked outrage in the blogosphere last week when it issued a blunt legal demand that the Drudge Retort, a small online news and commentary site, remove seven posts containing snippets –- all less than 80 words long –- from AP stories. The website, named in satirical homage to the much-larger Drudge Report news site, promptly complied with the demand but started the furor by calling attention to the incident in an online posting.
The traditional news media have long complained about freeloading by Internet sites that republish their articles without permission or compensation, and the AP is under pressure from its owner-members — 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers — to step up the fight against copyright infringement. The issue has heated up recently as newspapers have slashed staff and shrunk the size of their papers amid a severe advertising downturn.
But bloggers regard the use of news excerpts to stimulate online discussion as a long-established and constitutionally protected practice known as fair use. They reacted to the AP’s demand as if it had taken a hammer to a daisy.
TechCrunch, the popular Silicon Valley website, announced it would boycott AP stories until the organization reversed its stand. Another blogger, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, called on his peers to reprint AP articles at length in a Web-wide show of defiance.
Even Jim Kennedy, AP vice president for strategic planning, acknowledged that the legal tactic was heavy handed.
Faced with the withering reaction from the blogosphere, Kennedy and other AP executives ......."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimesblogs.latimes.com ...
Bloggers have a habit of researching “False but accurate” media stories.
No wonder they don’t want their “news” held up to light.
(Are those cockroaches?)
This is something that should be defied Web-wide by everyone. A headline, excerpt and link has to be considered Fair Use or the doctrine is close to meaningless.
Sooooo... if bloggers excerpt from the A.P.’s warning not to excerpt from the A.P., will they have to pay for the words?
I can see objecting to full-text or near-full-text uses, which remove any incentive to go to the source link. But shorter excerpts that are likely to result in hits to the original source should be beneficial to them. The advertising revenue of the AP member media outlets should be dependent on traffic to their websites, and excerpts with links should boost traffic to those websites. If they can’t figure out how to profit from this, they’re simply hopeless and are going to go belly up in the near future, regardless of anything the “blogosphere” does or doesn’t do with their articles.
Amalgamated Propaganda back Off?
but they own the news don’t they? or so they seem to think.
I find it interesting that the AP decided to pick on Drudge Retort, a little known parody site, instead of taking on sites like the Drudge Report or FR. Very similar to the WP/LAT lawsuit against FR. Pick on the little guy with minimal finances and hope that intimidation shuts everyone else up.
Have they always stolen and reworded news from local reporters,do they reimburse those local news outlets?
Those local news outlets are owner/members of AP. AP has the right to edit their articles, and they have the right to edit articles they get from the AP network.
My thought has always been for womeone to write a software program that takes the news source (such as AP) and autmatically reword the whole thing.
That way APs words (for example) aren’t used at all in the story published on the net.
Proof that FR has moved up a long way (while AP has been slipping downhill).
It would naturally have a spell checker built in so that words like ‘automatically’ are spelled correctly!
Pertinent.
http://thefutureofnews.com/
Is AP’s crackdown on bloggers actually a crackdown against defections of its own members?
If you say so.
I’ll take the local stories,ap can bite me;)
I imagine the same. They have to be careful about this because it isn't just an Internet-limited impact. Real newspapers who are already under market pressure are vulnerable to a real-world boycott that will have an effect more immediate than lost website traffic. And real-world newspapers do NOT want to face a choice between a consumer boycott or ceasing to use AP stories. Either way they lose. It'll be interesting to see how it works out.
Absolutely! Under this a scholar would have to pay to put a title in a footnote.
Was it a coincidence that Rush recently had a long rant against AP as the leader of the Driveby Media pack?
Babelfish comes to mind; but, I suspect the AP is already using that.
FR could be next with what I expect the par politics of AP are.
"There is also the possibilty that a computer program could be written by someone so that an entire news source report can be reworded automatically"
There ... just done it.
It is extremely small.
However, the “Drudge Report” has a huge audience.
OK, was that done automatically with software?
If so, why not have that as an alternative right here on FR to excerpting a news article?
No, of course it wasn’t done ‘automatically’, but simply a demonstration of juxtaposing the wording and phrasing around a bit to say exactly the same thing without running into the dreaded “five words in a row” that the AP now wants to dictate
AP??? I can get all the liberal news I need/want from NPR? Who needs the AP?
(( ping ))
It would seem that it might be possible for it to be done automatically.
Simply copy and paste the original story into the software, click for the reworded story and presto! same story, new wording.
By doing so, AP and all those who require excerpting could be easily accommodated, and at the same time all of us could have the whole story.
Not that that would make them happy, they might even require that no one even make any reference to the story that they claim to ‘own’.
They (the media) consider those on FR to be “bloggers,” even though we obviously are not.
I recall the old adage to “never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel”. But that has actually changed. With newspapers dwindling and the media using the Internet more and more, bloggers are on equal ground, with the capability to reach as many, or more, readers world-wide. The AP has picked a fight with the mob, and it’s own gang-members (Reuters, NYT, LAT, etc) are standing by and watching with interest to see if the AP will fight to the finish or slink away.
AP and the rest of them are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
They get far more traffic to their websites, and therefore their advertisers, by allowing excerpting. A fact they will soon discover when their advertisers start to complain about the drop off of traffic and demands for further discounting of web advertising.
I am the “webmaster” for a hot rod shop website that has a lot of hi res photography on it. Our photos are often hot-linked into blog forums and elsewhere. When I became aware of this, I had two choices: 1) block the hot links to reduce bandwidth usage of our server, or 2) take advantage of the interest in our content.
So, I went through the site edited the photos that were of greatest interest for hot-linking and embedded our web address into each photo. I also did it in such a way as to enable full enjoyment of the photo. Since doing this our web traffic has jumped 20% or more.
www.hotrodscustomstuff.com
AP needs to pull its head out....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.