Posted on 06/17/2008 4:57:40 PM PDT by Anti-Bubba182
The Associated Press took a grandiose Facebook-style faceplant last week when it attempted to impose strict guidelines on the blogosphere.
Now, just like Facebook’s initial unapologetic enthusiasm for its privacy-violating Beacon program followed by Facebook’s effusive apology for its privacy-violating Beacon program, the AP is bowing to the will of the angry Internet masses and backing off. Sort of. [snip]
[snip]To citizen journalists out in cyberspace, AP’s proclamation against one little aggregate site (much smaller in comparison to, say, Digg, etc.) rang like a shot across the bow of fair use, especially after an AP spokesperson announced that, from here on out, the news agency would take action against blogs, “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.”
After some sort of emergency executive meeting, AP's Kennedy spoke to Saul Hansell of The New York Times. In what read like an effort to appease the enraged cyber mob, Kennedy admitted to the “heavy handed” verbiage in its Drudge Retort missive and assured all that better guidelines would likely result from The Big Blogging Meet-up this week.
(Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, the initial Drudge Retort cease and desist stands.)
It’s probably safe to assume that, diplomacy aside, the AP still feels pretty good about instituting some sort of restrictions on said cutting and pasting. So we’ve got a few interesting things in play here. On the one hand, there’s the sensible legal condition summed up by Hansell in the Times article: "One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner."......"
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
I am waiting. It is clear the AP lawyers have no proper concept of Fair Use. The reaction to the AP tactic is embarrassing them. They need to adopt a more reasonable position and limit of free excerpts.
What ‘financial harm’ is inflicted on the AP by the ‘fair use’ of their articles?
If anything, MORE people are sent to read the original articles after seeing portions excerpted in posts.
I agree, they should encourage people to excerpt and link, It's good for overall readership.
They need to drop the lower limits altogether.
Let them eat yellowcake.
You just cannot keep a freeman down can you....
I like it — would that work? Would our moderator be OK with doing that? Makes sense to me.... Also like the “YODA” suggestion where everything is scrambled. Legally, I doubt anyone could sue under copyright infringement if it’s not a direct quote.
Nope.
I don’t think AP liked being threatened by the bloggers about being sued in kind for more than a 4 word quote from their sites. And really, what else does AP report that has anything but plagarized quotes from the blogs?
That's sort of interesting. In principle, if you are interviewed by the AP at the scene of a crime or something, they should have to compensate you to use your words in their articles based om the spirit of their position in this matter, right? Same for photos, the people photographed should be compensated for AP using their image commercially (unless they sign a waiver but imagine the potential in damages if they had to dole out a payment to everyone in a crowd shot of the Super Bowl....er I mean "the big game"...sorry NFL!
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