AP is apparently expecting us to pay by the words for words exerpted from their articles. It sucks to be part of a dying medium, I’m sure, but fair use is fair use. Here’s another fun tidbit:
It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”
The mainstream media is declaring war on blogs. We have to be ready and willing to circle the wagons to protect our medium. Do we have laywers who would be willing to work cheap in the event a blog gets sued? I think it’s time to start lining that up. A lot is at stake.
I have little to no doubt the first suit brought to bear by the AP for a weblogger excerpting their articles will be laughed out of court and summarily slapped down… That said, it would suck to be that test case.
I guess fair use and attribution have finally taken a back seat to profit margins. If they are this desperate for money, I am definitely sliding into the “starve them” camp – after all, it is the advertisements on their aticles, as well as the use of those articles, that makes them money. We stop linking, their traffic goes down… Might not be much, but it might be noticed.
Fair use isn’t as cut and dried as we might want it to be. There are many factors at work in determining whether a use is fair. I would tend to think most bloggers snippets fall under fair use, but until a judge says so, it’s no that clear.
NY Times Article About It
From the Fark thread about it:
I am not necessarily saying that the law is cut-and-dried… in fact, most of it is far from that. Rather, I am approaching it from the “precedent” angle, because if this goes the way the AP seems to want it, the next time the child of one of those AP new executives goes to write a research paper, he or she is going to have to reimburse all of the sources he/she cited/quoted.
For that matter, how do you define “excerpt”? Because, I can 100% guarantee you, that if you go through yours or my weblog’s records, you will find at least one multi-word phrase that shows up in at least one AP news article (outside of direct, attributed quotes, of course).
I am not saying stupid laws and stupid rulings have not been passed before, but this one would rank among the highest.
so…can you quote multiple strings of 4 words?
Should this actually go anywhere, the other AP should be brought into play, ALWAYS PARAPHRASE…and of course it bring with it the ever popular GO POUND SAND!
patterico.com
“Now, in a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.”
h/t to Hot Air.
So the AP is throwing a tantrum because they’re a dying medium and are losing revenue because of the bloggers? Can I be the one to put the first shovelful of dirt on its coffin at its burial? Boy! they sound like the First Amendment was meant for them and no one else. The AP is dying, someone call the Waaaah-mbulance!!
Good riddance to the AP.