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AP Targets Blog Excerpts With DMCA Notices

Posted by Soulskill on from the out-of-cite-out-of-mind dept.

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."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Does this mean.. by SirLurksAlot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:Does this mean.. by TheFamilyGuy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Any RSS feed for that matter can fall under this description. Should igoogle be banned for copyright infringement since I choose to get my news from various sources all on my google home page? This is absurd.

  2. Re:Just another attack on Fair Use by mr_matticus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    They're not taking down commentaries that quote or reference.

  3. Re:You need to RTFA by Liquidrage · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From what I saw the retort posts had "zero" of their own content. Basically someone at the retort would post the headline from an article, a few sentences from the article. And that's it. Comment away!

    There was no "So Yahoo is running a story on..."
    It was actually just a piece of Yahoo's story. So I can see the issue and they certainly did not look like a typical post and reply here on /.