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AP Targets Blog Excerpts With DMCA Notices
Ian Lamont points us to The Industry Standard, which reports that the Associated Press has filed DMCA takedown notices against news site 'The Drudge Retort' for excerpting portions of AP news releases. The site's creator, Rogers Cadenhead, has posted his analysis of the letters sent to him by the AP. Employees of the AP have defended the notices in posts on various blogs, saying, "We get concerned when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That's not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the Internet that you and others have cultivated so well."
I hate The Drudge Report. At the same time, I see nothing wrong with excerpting news stories. I don't know who to root for...
Grammar Nazi
Don't forget the attribution!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
The Drudge Retort != The Drudge Report
that /. could fall within the AP's sights as well? I glanced drudge.com and it looks like they have even less of a story on their front page than /. does. Of course here most (if not all) of the stories are prefaced with "According to..." or some other similar wording with a link back to the article.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
The articled says "[The Culture] you and others have cultivated" now correct me if I'm wrong but that implies they are not part of this culture so how can they proclaim that quouting things isnt part of our culture? No one knows a culture better than those immersed in it. As far as im concerned quouting is also fundamental to the internet, then again thats just me.
The AP is so reluctant to take down the fake photos they so often publish.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Pot + Kettle = Black And http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=527_1205782611 The old mediums are dying out and going down fighting.
if you RTFA the cited articles DO properly link the story, posting the relevant excerpts to save a little time and bandwidth, and to clarify exactly which part of the story is relevant to the discussion.
It most definitely is an attack on fair use.
the sites are not plagiarizing the AP, they are posting quotes with relevant links.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It seems to me this issue could have been avoided simply by properly citing the original article.
Every writing class you have ever taken since high school has taught you that if you use "excerpts" (which is all this guy said his users did), that you cite the original source.
Pretty basic.
Two interesting points:
The longest quote used was 2 paragraphs "from the end of the article." They don't say how long of an article though.
The article writer attempts to address fair use but just happens to leave out the "for the purpose of comment and criticism" aspect.
It's about time some of these news organizations acted to protect their copyrights. It's one thing for a blogger to cut and paste out bits of an article for analysis and context. It's quite another to cut out large sections - or the entire thing - and then collect advertising revenue off the work of others.
I see this far too much. Time for a beat-down.
Wackos on teh intartubes has slowly beat into my head over the last decade the rationale for DRM. All I want is for writers, musicians, artists, and other content creators to retain their copyrights and DRM keys. Yes to DRM; no to centralized distribution monopolies.
I quote relevant parts of articles because the AP has a tendency to memory hole their work. Those quotes are required for intelligent criticism. When you can't go back and look at the work, you have nothing but the hot air broadcasters would like you to have. When hundreds of people quote articles, history is preserved for fair evaluation.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Very true.
That's exactly the problem. People "excerpt" the body of the article (change the headline and omit the byline) without reference or attribution in their "blogs" all the time.
Searching for a news story produces hundreds of results on blogs that are just copies of one article, and it becomes frustrating when you want to find more information rather than just repeats of the same exact article text. A blog isn't an AP newswire feed (where it makes sense for a local newspaper).
Just link to the original at a persistent source. Blogs that are regurgitation and not reference are basically just Internet cholesterol, and if you step past your vein-popping at the mere mention of a DMCA takedown notice for a moment, people should be able to appreciate the effort of a news organization clearing the clutter. This is material that is available for free from any number of outlets. It's not about free speech or fair use in the slightest. It's about controlling distribution to improve quality of online news--not censorship, or commentary, or any other conspiracy.
that beacon of independent journalism lazily quoted around the world without question or any original research by the quoting parties (all news outlets who I'm sure pay them for their feed, how 1980s).
Poor them. For once the message may have been cut-and-pasted a bit too (un?)skewed for their tastes, or who knows, have contained actual unbiased truth (Dog help us!)
Poor them.
Yup they surely need the fascist DMCA to make sure they will remain the number one source of the whole truth and nothing but the truth for the people. No thought crime allowed. After all, this is a new time.
Poor them.
> We get concerned when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when
> others are encouraged to cut and paste.
Fair use. Learn to live with it.
> That's not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based
> culture of the Internet that you and others have cultivated so well
Whereas AP articles, of course, are just chockfull of links.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If you ever want to link to (or even just read) Associated Press news stories without all the clutter of most websites, use Google. For example: news.google.com search for roma tomatoes source:"associated press" and an example AP story found.
The seven takedowns themselves are unimportant. The AP is clearly trying to produce a chilling effect preventing people from posting excerpts at all with this sort of thing. Unfortunately for them, they can't really do it. The blog owner won't play ball, and the original posters are unthreatened by the notices.
Whatever the details of this particular case, whenever I hear things like "link-based culture" I just think how out of touch old journalism is with the Web. It's like they can't understand the deeper concepts like shared resources that linking implies.
Most big newspapers didn't really even establish much of an online presence until Web 2.0 was gaining momentum, and they're still trying to catch up. Web sites, like the Los Angeles Times, fear user-generated content like wikis because they can't figure out how to manage them. They don't trust the medium enough to embrace concepts like self-regulated systems that work through tagging, ratings, etc...
It really makes me wonder how these news sites will survive... consider that ABC News' idea of bringing in an online audience was to have someone with a laptop sitting with the commentators/anchors screening messages from Facebook; the internet is supposed to enable direct communication between individuals, not the same filtered meaningless content that's been called news for the last few decades...
Consider too that many wire articles that reference Web sites do not actually link directly to the Web site. Why? Do they not know how? Are they afraid of what people might see, or do they not trust the authenticity of the site? Maybe they just don't like the idea of people getting information directly from sources.
Do not link to any AP stories. Do not quote AP. Just ignore AP and let them see a drop in hits and eyeballs, which will result in lower advertisement fees.
Money talks. Hit them in the cash flow.....
...should become a central doctrine that every Constitution-loving individual should be touting to their representatives. When items of fact can be controlled through the premise of copyright protection, the *IAAs' will look like a child's prank compared to the censorship of thought and ideas that will arise by extending monopolies to cover facts.
Irregardless of ANY form of creativeness, press is a protection of the People that may neither be hindered nor prohibited by the State, and this includes Congress. Congress is granted the power to extend copyrights, or temporal monopolies on ideas and expression. Press, on the other hand, is a power of the People, which Congress has NO power to hinder.
Copyright in and of itself hinders the natural dissemination of an idea by restricting the distribution of that idea. Press was expressly included in the first Amendment as an exclusion to the powers of Congress in extending copyrights, that the dissemination of current and historic fact may not be controlled and censored.
If we continue to allow works of the Press to be treated as works protected under Copyright, than eventually we will no longer be allowed to claim the sky to be blue, for a fact to be true, or for 1+1 to equal 2, without infringing copyright and becoming enemies of the State.
Perhaps news reporting should be given a vastly shorter copyright term... say, 1 week as opposed to "forever" as is currently the practice.
Seriously, how much value does a week-old news article have nowadays?
Copyright is great for "expressive works". It's not really good when applied to "facts".
AP targets bloggers over story excerpts
Jordan Golson06.13.2008
The Associated Press, the not-for-profit news cooperative, has filed DMCA notices against social news/blog The Drudge Retort for posting short excerpts of AP stories. In a letter to Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of The Retort, the AP believes "the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use."
The "AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation."
The AP sent DMCA notices to the Drudge Retort, demanding that the site to take down content that the AP believes infringes on its copyright. Seven notices were sent in total, some regarding headlines and first paragraph excerpts, but at least one referencing a two-paragraph excerpt from the end of an AP story. It seems the AP is serious about protecting all its stories from virtually any sort of excerpting.
The Associated Press is a wire service that sells license to reprint stories for a hefty fee to member press outlets. Contrary to what Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks, the AP doesn't have "inbound links" or "search juice" -- only member organizations do. The AP believes that by reproducing AP content without paying for it, the Drudge Retort is diminishing the benefit its pay customers get from its product. That is, why pay for AP content when you can just republish it for free?
This isn't the first time in recent months that AP has resorted to legal action against sites that it felt were misappropriating its content.
In October, the AP sued news aggregator Moreover for fair-use violations. That company, owned by VeriSign, provides news from a wide variety of sources to paying subscribers. The AP charged that Moreover was "scraping," or copying, the full text of AP stories and sending them to Moreover's customers without paying AP for the rights.
Unlike the Retort case, Moreover was accused of commercially using full-length AP stories without any payment. AP believes (correctly, in my non-lawyer opinion) that this is far outside any reasonable interpretation of fair use.
(Disclosure: Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my former boss at Valleywag, was a cofounder of Moreover)
"Fair use" is a legal term-of-art and one that is frequently misunderstood. There are a number of requirements and standards that must be met for a use to be considered "fair" and it is far outside the purview of this article to define it. In fact, it is impossible to define as fair use is generally considered on a case-by-case basis, but these are the most common determinants:
â The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
â The nature of the copyrighted work.
â The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
â The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The AP believes that by posting excerpts of its content, The Retort (and presumably anyone else using AP content without paying) is reducing the value of its subscription service.
There has not been a significant blogger v. mainstream media copyright battle yet, but the Associated Press sure isn't making any friends with this maneuver. Influential media critic Jeff Jarvis slams the organization in a blog posting titled "FU AP". Jarvis has a long-standing beef with the AP about the organization's lack of credit for original reporting and linking when it repurposes reporting from member newspapers.
Jarvis feels the AP is "declaring war on blogs and commenters" and wants bloggers to reproduce the full length of an AP story to show "solidarity" with the Drudge Retort.
(Photo from the Library of Congress)
Isn't this what the news does all the time? Quite often I'll see the Daily Show showing coverage of an event or topic on all the popular TV news channels, and they'll all use the same exact joke or quip.
In the local city paper in texas, they have a 6", one column story about how someone in Kansas was killed. This person is not otherwise newsworthy.
1st... WHO CARES????
2nd... This creates the impression that the world is a lot more dangerous place than it really is.
3rd... again.. who cares? This isn't a famous person- they have no ties to texas... there is no reason for it to be reported anywhere in texas.
It's like talking about how wild monkeys are attacking a village in india last year.
I want my local paper to have local news. Heck, tell me about the flood control changes they plan ahead of time (instead of afterwards)- tell me about something happening in other texas cities.
The national stories should be in a national section and should be significant- not random.
Really bugs me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They're not taking down commentaries that quote or reference.
That is exactly what they are doing.
This is bullshit and it must end right now.
AP - are you posting the articles yourself? From my analysis, the answer is no.
This will end right now.
An exerpt is not a copyright violation, even if it is in quotes. If you are not even posting the full articles, why are you posting heresy that they are violating your copyright?
Do we need to go over what a link is? You can review that ruling.
Information in text is technically not a digital copyright - a picture, yes, but text no. This is bullshit and I can't even believe that you are trying to blanket statement the internet with DMCA. The act was not intended that way, and I can't even believe that you have the tenacity to even suggest court action.
The AP is what? Non-profit. You are paid from many sources to do what you are asked in a fair manner. This is news, not AP bull.
Hopefully, when I read the Slashdot post about the EFF taking up this case to clear up what exactly are the boundaries of "fair use" here.
Then I will be able to cut-paste-search-and-replace your first sentence:
"news organizations" -> "the public"
"copyright" -> "fair use rights"
With regards to the rest of your post: you didn't even bother to investigate the 7 cases in question:
> cut out large sections - or the entire thing
The reason the AP is contending this is not "fair use" is totally different --- in the blog posts in question there was practically no content added to the quoted material, which itself was a very small part of the linked articles.
> Yes to DRM
I suppose you meant "DRM which works". No such thing, especially for written works, which I understand is what you produce.
> Wackos on teh intartubes has slowly beat into my
> head over the last decade the rationale for DRM.
Wackos in real life have slowly beat into my head the rationale for easy space travel and practically free non-polluting energy. That doesn't mean I'm going to get them....
I guess that you, and I, should probably gear up to actually deal with reality.
> Seriously, how much value does a week-old news article have nowadays?
It can be used as the basis of the average Slashdot post?
Many blogs copy photos from legitimate news sources, that
alone may be suspect but even worse, fail to at least
attribute the source and/or photographer.
A few years ago I wasted my time explaining this issue to
the owner of this site. For a few
days after there was an effort made at giving proper
credits. But I guess it was just too much work. Given
her sites popularity and her own work on TV you would
think she would be more careful.
And I'll repeat that question:
Do you even know what the AP even is?
The Associated Press was started by a bunch of small-town newspapers who individually simply couldn't even begin to compete against the major newspapers (mainly east-coast U.S. newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post). Some of those major papers did allow these small town newspapers to reproduce their stories, but charged extortionist prices for the content.
So instead, a bunch of these much smaller newspapers decided to get together and share their own news gathering resources with each other and try to substantially reduce royalty fees for reproducing content. In a few cases there were "bureaus" that were set up and financed by the collective organization, but for the most part they relied upon a dispersed distribution model where the "members" each contributed stories for the general geographic region where they lived.
There was also a voluntary "significance" rating applied to each story as well, ranging from general human-interest stories (somebody just raised a two-headed snake, biggest ball of twine in Smallville, Iowa) to significant news (war has just been declared or a major world leader has been assassinated). Mainly it was newspaper editors trying to help each other out and fill each other's newspapers with content without having to break the bank with a huge payroll of reporters.
Frankly the AP in my mind represents nearly the spirit of the open source movement in a great many ways, even though it is a commercial entity. You can debate about the current incarnation of the Associated Press and its current operations, but it certainly has an admirable and interesting heritage.
The issue here isn't big bad business vs. lonely bloggers... it is more how a 19th Century American institution based on a distributed content model can adapt to the 21st Century, and how content intended for one medium is being adapted for a much newer medium, where the business model will change.
There are several blogger and web-based distributed news gathering sources that create original content (aka not copy AP stories), but unfortunately most of these bloggers are taking the easy way out and simply doing a direct copy of what is clearly copyrighted work. If these same bloggers would support (and reference) these alternatives, this would have been a non-story at all. Indeed many of these alternatives even post content with a free content license like CC-by-SA or something similar.
I'm a writer.
I mean, maybe, for really low values of 'writer'.
For example:
$170.42
As my date laughed, the crow's feet by her eyes widened from lines to full crevasses, like a river having carved out little ravines. Certainly, by the look of her forty-two years, she had been born in a prior geologic age. But then, so had I.
She had just uttered some quip about a college internship, which I missed because my attention had been diverted by a young waitress, with a very tight figure, performing the bee dance with her ass. The waitress waddled along provocatively to some other table holding several full plates in one hand, but my date's eyes had slow-blinked in laughter at just that moment. I don't think she noticed.
"He was so little, so precious, " she said, "I just knew right then that teaching was going to be my future." She lifted her glass of Chianti, rolled the red liquid seemingly entranced in thought, and then took a shallow sip.
I didn't have a good followthrough, but fortunately that waitress intervened to check on our dinner.
"Excellent. Thank you." I took a small bite of the creamed spinach with pine nuts to show my appreciation. My date ignored her.
"So, what do you do again?"
"I'm a chemist."
"Where did you go -"
"- Penn State for undergrad; UT for my Ph.D."
"Interesting." At that instant, her eyes appeared to fix upon the wine label, unwittingly expressing just how boring she felt my career path had been.
"Yup."
"So," she tried again, "why not the university life of a professor? Don't like teaching?"
"No, it's not that. My research didn't pan out like I expected. And it took a bit longer than most to earn the Ph.D. When it was over, I had a string of publications with obvious and predicted results. I took this big risk on radioactive solvents as catalysts, which went nowhere. And -"
"- Oh."
Her face showed the confusion everyone outside my field does whenever I try to explain its more obvious details. I should have known better.
"It's just a job. Pays the bills."
"Hey, we all need a job." She smiled and our eyes touched for the first time that evening.
Hypnotized, I forgot to sneak a look at the waitress as she passed by toward another table. For just a second, imperceptible to others yet for us like a slow-blues riff ringing out a whole note in vibrato, we existed together not as one flesh but as one soul. And then it was over.
My date found a spot in the tablecloth to be distracted by. Her forefinger slid up the stem of her wineglass to the rim, whereupon she made circling motions along its lip. Her face pointed toward the table, but her eyes just then peaked back through strands of auburn hair and I felt the stirring of flesh deep inside.
"Hey," she said, "try a sip of this wine." Her hand pushed the glass across the table toward me. As I reached for it, I felt her finger ever so slightly press against mine as the glass passed into my hand. At that instant, I heard the slight whisper of a gasp uttered from her lips.
"Excuse me," she said, "I'll be right back." The mood vanished before the napkin was off her lap and on the table. She stood up and walked to the nearest waiter, who pointed to the restroom.
The waitress stopped by to ask if we would like anything else. She had that perfect mix of professionalism to deter unwarranted advances by customers, yet while somehow also wearing unreasonably revealing attire. Nipples pierced back at me through her low cut white blouse like the eyes of a mountain lion. Her stomach flatter than Kansas, and think I noticed a belly button ring extruding out underneath black silk fabric. She wore some kind of rosemary light oil scent, but all I could smell was sex. Sex all over her. In that second I imaged that her boyfriend had just bent her over their kitchen table, lifted her miniskirt, and quick-fucked her silly on the spot only minutes before her shift had started. And I wanted t
I could not disagree more with your armchair psychology and simplistic ethics.
I spend time on several blogs and web fora, and it's considered good practice to reproduce the entire story (along with proper attribution, of course). The problem with posting only a link, or brief excerpts and a link, is that the original sources don't keep the stories available indefinitely. Unlike print--which can usually be found, in some form or another--soft copies really do go away, leaving dead links, and no way to find the article under discussion. If a discussion lasts longer than two weeks (7-14 days seems like a common "no longer available" period), or gets dragged out of the archives after a year or two, the original context is lost.
If the AP wants us to quit quoting full stories, they need to provide a reliable archive for us that will be accessible indefinitely. None of this "this article is available from our archives for $5" crap, either.
Another benefit of making a copy of the text is that digital stories--again, unlike hard copy--are trivially altered without a trace. In fact, we see this frequently, and while some media at least post an "edited at x" line, I haven't seen any that post a full changelog. By copying the original story, we are able to keep the original context.
I suspect this is going to become an interesting issue in defining fair use in the courts.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
I hate to point this out but has anyone ever clicked the copyright info on an AP web site. such as House of Lords Story [ap.org] from further up today. If you check the copyright link at the bottom you will see that the AP lets users post the entire story for free.
"Post this article on your website, blog, social networking page, or intranet for a limited time, free of charge, with ads. Includes the AP logo, copyright notice, and links. You can link to the article or display it using inline frames."
I think this is what they really want to make sure there logo and ADS are the real issue here. AP wants money for letting you use any part of its story probably.
I also like this option they give you. "Excerpt for Web Use License parts of this article for republishing on your website or intranet. Pricing based on the number of words excerpted."
"words 5-25 $ 12.50 words 26-50 $ 17.50 words 51-100 $ 25.00 words 101-250 $ 50.00 words 251 and up $ 100.00"
I say its all about the money and nothing with fair use. So if you post 4 words or under thats ok because there not charging for that.
Maybe you should support your principles over personal biases? To do otherwise is shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm astounded by the number of people who will go out of their way to create "ill-will" for someone (or some entity) even if at personal cost to themselves. Vendettas are a waste of resources to aid in carrying out obsessive 'stalking' of a target. Yet (IMO), especially under Bush-II's leadership, I've seen this become seen as not only acceptable, but admirable practice... it's counter productive.
It's simple enough. Don't link to, or quote any AP stories. No links = no google juice. That means AP licenses loose value as those who license AP content get less traffic. Lets ruin their business model. It's the best thing that can be done. Lets make their content impossible to monitize, so that those who license their content INSIST on less restrictive terms.
You may copy small pieces of an article for quotation or citation purposes in order to promote a new perspective or provide analysis of that original work. In so doing, you will have created a new original work, which is copyrighted and owned by you - the author.
You may duplicate content that you have purchased for backup purposes. For example, you may photocopy or scan an entire textbook for your own use. You may not then distribute that scan without authorization of the copyright holder. This is why it is legal to rip CDs and move the resulting mp3s to your portable music player. It is also why it is illegal to distribute ripped CDs, whether that be by P2P, FTP, or just copying from one iPod to another owned by a friend.
It's even unclear whether public school teachers and academic universities may duplicate entire articles for class participation. That certainly was the case, though that claim of "fair use" is currently being challenged.
Any other duplication or distribution of copyrighted works, especially if done for profit, is a felony.
www.unassociatedpress.net has now come online to consolidate the story and gather news as well as petition...
> I am believe that DRM hardware based solutions are workable and will
> take hold in the market at some point in the future
You do realize that any text you can read is easily photographed? Care to estimate how many Slashdotters are capable of whipping up a system which either physically or virtually presses the "scroll down" key and grabs a photo (possible running OCR), repeatedly?