AP as copyright cop
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Workbench’s Rogers Cadenhead found him in a copyright (what else?) dispute with giant wire company the Associated Press.
AP had accused him of committing what amounted to ‘hot news’ theft.
AP vice president for strategic planning JimKennedy later, “acknowledged that the legal tactic was heavy handed,” said the Los Angeles Times, adding:
“Faced with the withering reaction from the blogosphere, Kennedy and other AP executives … decided that ‘we were maybe pressing this too far,’ he said. ‘Our gut feeling was that we needed to rethink it’.”
No kidding.
“I’m currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing ‘hot news’ misappropriation under New York state law,” Cadenhead posted, continuing:
“An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.”
AP and Cadenhead apparently resolved their immediate problems, but in an AP follow-up story, “he said a larger conflict remains between AP’s view of acceptable use of its content and the practices of many bloggers,” says the story, going on:
“Cadenhead declined to comment further, referring all questions to his attorney.”
Meanwhile, “The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” says University of South Carolina School of Law professor Timothy Wu in Sivacracy, quoted by the school’s Ann Bartow, who goes on >>>
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.
“It’s hard to see how the Drudge Retort ‘first few lines’ is a substitute for the story,” Mr. Wu said.
Mr. Kennedy argued, however, that The Associated Press believes that in some cases, the essence of an article can be encapsulated in very few words.
“As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.
Says Bartow >>>
No doubt the excerpt above violates the AP’s vision of how its content should be used by blogs. One quote from the AP representative that I didn’t reproduce announced that “he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.”
If I had to offer a short summary of this article I guess I’d have to go with: AP efforts to control content use by blogs will antagonize a lot of people for no good reason.
Bloggers might quote less and summarize more, but it is at least as likely that they will quote more and link less, because without linking it will be far more difficult to catch the quotations, and quotes are likely to be lengthier if they substitute for links, rather than amplifying them.
Stay tuned.
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.Stumble It!
giant wire company – AP retreats in ‘excerpts’ blog row, June 17, 2008
Los Angeles Times – AP picks a fight with bloggers, June 16, 2008
AP – AP, blogger resolve dispute over copyright, June 21, 2008
Sivacracy – The Associated Press Has Started To Police Blogs For Copyright Infringement, June 18, 2008
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June 24th, 2008 at 7:27 am
While I get the anger and outrage from bloggers, but what’s missing is the balance on the flip side – I’m pretty sure none of the bloggers involved would like to have *their* content used, “stolen” (tongue firmly in cheek here), or otherwise misappropriated in a similar way. I suppose it’s easier to crab at the big mean corporation that produces content professionally…
Just look at the tag that comes at the bottom of every one of p2pnet.net’s posts in your RSS feed: “This has been nicked from: p2pnet.net – not the lamescream media
It’s not an easy problem and AP is at least trying – ham-fistedly, but they are trying.
meh.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Hi Dan:
“This has been nicked from: p2pnet.net – not the lamescream media” didn’t convey what I meant, so I’ve just changed the tag to “p2pnet.net – not the lamescream media”.
Meanwhile, p2pnet stuff gets nicked all the time, including by the mainstream media, but as I’ve said from the beginning, although I’d appreciate it if people would give credit where credit is due, bottom line, the object of the exercise is to get the word out, not score mentions.
And as I said in my first post on this, “I’m always at pains to provide a first link the originals in the body copy, as well as mentions within stories, and to add a link to the headline and date at the bottom of each.”
Cheers!
June 24th, 2008 at 11:23 am
The real problem for the Asshat Press (unannounced name change noted) is that facts can not be protected by copyright. Since proper journalists are trained to report facts, there are significantly less copyright protectable elements in a news story than in a fictional short story. This is what leads to the observation that a short summary of the story is non-infringing, while a short quotation is possibly infringing.
The AP seems to feel that fair use is unavailable to bloggers. I call BS.
BTW, they don’t eat their own dogfood: AP Violates Own Copyright Law By Quoting 22 Words from TechCrunch
SRG