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AP to Charge Members to Post Content Online
oboreruhito writes "The Associated Press has announced that, effective Jan. 1 2006, it 'will begin charging newspapers and broadcasters to post its stories, photos and other content online.' The article says online portals that are already subscribed to an online service won't be affected; the change is that newspapers and broadcasters, which have had the privilege of posting online at no extra charge over their usual licensing fees for print or TV, now have to pay extra. How will this affect sites like Google News and Fark?"
Why would it affect fark? They just link to em...
OMG F1R57 P057!
Google might be affected a little, but anyone that is paying the AP to carry the story will still have it posted, and google (or fark) could get to it that way.
Depending on how much they are charging, though it might force other sites to start charging online subscruption fees, as a large amount of free news will not be there anymore...
How will this affect sites like Google News and Fark?"
More boobies links!
Thanks, AP! : )
You can't take the sky from me...
How does this affect me?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Why do slashdot articles end with inane questions that obviously aren't interesting or useful? They just drive discussion away from actual article. Instead, we have a whole page of people agreeing that this almost has almost no impact on Google or Fark.
(Yeah, yeah, offtopic.)
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
This decision won't affect Google and Fark at all, since they simply link to other sites that post the AP's content. It will affect Yahoo! News, since they do post original AP content.
BTW, it's a PITA to use the AP's content. I used their feed to add headlines to the site for a TV station. They can't just have an XML feed; noooo, they have to post XML-formatted articles to a usenet server, adding an extra layer of complexity. You have to fetch the most recent post from the headline group, parse it for the links to the articles, then fetch the articles, then parse them for links to the image content, then fetch those articles, then parse them for the image content, which has to then be watermarked with the AP logo (or labeled directly underneath the picture; running it through ImageMagick to add the watermark was easier). (And to make matters worse, I had to write the stuff to do this in Perl running on Windows.)