Posted on 07/25/2009 10:15:13 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA
Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.
Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.
Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.
“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.
Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use. Executives at some news organizations have said they are reluctant to test the Internet boundaries of fair use, for fear that the courts would rule against them.
Mr. Curley declined to address the fair use question, or to say what action The A.P. would take against sites that use articles without licensing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It’s hard to tell what they’ll end up doing, but I think they resent google doing including them in their web searches—which basically means using the whole article as people search for words that may appear in it.
But if google no longer includes AP articles in their search machine, then nobody is going to see AP at all. They’d lose maybe 90% of their current readers, I suspect.
People use google to find articles, but then they go to the articles and give them an ad hit. That’s a lot of lost ad hits.
-PJ
LOLOLOL!!! YOu have made a very VALID POINT! Pay up Zero...pay up!!
Oh please let them do this. It will guarantee their demise.
The answer here locally has been to totally ignore them and discourage posting as little of their material as can be found elsewhere. Many times I can find the same material reported better in one of their rival’s papers anyway.
I still have one of their reporters hit my site daily looking for material (I know what his IP is). Same for the newsroom server for the very guys who say I’m “unfair competition”. I find that the very worst thing I can do is ignore them...they are by nature attention whores, and it bites deep when nobody pays them any mind.
At some point there needs to be a complete boycott of AP to let them know the ‘net can push back.
I always paste into something that only understands plain text then copy/paste from there into the final target.
As for Ad-Aware I could not live without it!!!
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