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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."
The Drudge Retort != The Drudge Report
The regular newspapers and news outlets pay the AP for access to reproduce full articles, and also credit the AP for the story. Many blogs just rip whole stories for free and don't even provide proper credit.
I've only glanced at TFA, but it seems they are not taking issue with them quoting, but rather with them quoting misleadingly, i.e. without attribution. Without reference to the source, or even worse, without referencing the fact that you are quoting something else. For instance look at the example Cadenhead uses. It has a link to the article, followed by a quote from the article. But there is no indication that the quote is a quote! It is essentially being passed off as original commentary on the content of the article, even if that isn't what the author intended.
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.
No, if you actually paid attention, the site in question is a pure reposting of AP content headlines, ledes, and bodies. This is what AP is objecting to. Not the comments or discussion that it sparks, and not actual commentary provided by authors on the site in question. In fact, had you truly read the article, you'd see this:
"AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent actions with the Drudge Retort, and also reassure those in the blogosphere about AP's view of these situations. Yes, indeed, we are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond brief references and direct links to our coverage.
The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers -- large and small -- in the news conversation of the day. Some of the largest blogs are licensed to display AP stories in full on a regular basis. We genuinely value and encourage referring links to our coverage, and even offer RSS feeds from www.ap.org, as do many of our licensed customers.
We get concerned, however, 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 bloggers have cultivated so well.
In this particular case, we have had direct and helpful communication with the site in question, focusing only on these issues.
So, let's be clear: Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but Jeff Jarvis' call for widespread reproduction of wholesale stories is out of synch with the environment he himself helped develop. There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers.
Jim Kennedy
VP and Director of Strategy for AP"
As an employee of a newspaper, maybe I can shed a bit of light on the subject. Generally, if we are excerpting fewer than ten lines of an AP article, we will just attribute to AP, however, if we use more than that, we give a byline to the individual author and AP. I believe this is standard industry practice.
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.