Slashdot Mirror
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Don't worry. I stopped regularly posting here some time back. Perhaps you'll not even see me again. But if you'd like to be certain of that, I suggest you foe me and set your comment prefs to -5 for foes. And I'll just disappear from your view.
I considered my post a bit harsh, but the point still stands.
/. has essentially the same format?
how on earth can you rain derision on drudge when
your support for "impossible dream" of using DRM to steal our rights and sell them back to us didn't help in eliciting a fully rational response either.
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> 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.
A) Not Drudge. It is the "Drudge Retort", a counter-site to the drudge report. But don't worry, when one of my articles got picked up by the Drudge Retort, I too was confused and thought I'd made the Drudge Report's FP.
B) I'm a writer. My copyright is mine, not yours.
C) Look up "fair use" and see if duplication of large sections of a copyrighted work has ever been acceptable prior to the advent of digital technology. It wasn't.
I like digital distribution. I hate thieves. Especially of my work, because when people steal stuff I worked hard to create, it pissed me the fuck off. It would piss you off too, had you done that work.
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.
If you actually RTFA and followed the links enough, you'd see there is a good difference between what /. does and what this drudge retort was doing.
/. submissions are often quotes from an article along with some commentary. The retort's posts has no commentary, and were 100% made up of pieces from the article. And presented in a manner that did not make that clear.
What I find the bestest is how much of a cocky ass you were about this when didn't even bother to have a clue what you were talking about.
What I find the bestest is how much of a cocky ass you were about this when didn't even bother to have a clue what you were talking about. The irony is so potent here I can't help but smile.
Since you seem to be so intent on your vendetta as to pursue me to other threads, I'll again post the link to the analysis showing they did in fact link the article, and post excerpts in the same way
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That's isn't analysis, that is a person involved in the dispute making his case.
And furthermore, read what I actually wrote. I didn't say they did not link to the article. I pointed out that *UNLIKE* slashdot their "postings" had *NO* commentary. None. Zero. I don't mean the user comments. I mean scroll up on this page and find "Ian Lamont points us to The Industry Standard..."
Now replace everything in that article submission with a paragraph from the linked article. Then just link the headline to the article.
Do you get it yet? That were not citing an article. They were taking a section of an article and using that as their "entire" content that people could respond to.
Lastly, you are a paranoid freak if you think I know you from Adam let alone have a vendetta against you.
I'm sorry no I dont.
that's subjective.
I in fact prefer greater fidelity in the summary.
I once submitted and had accepted a story about the dangers of voting machine hacking.
I'm a leftist but I believed the problem was serious for both sides and framed the summary in a very neutral manner.
The version that made it to the front page was nothing like what I submitted, and presented the issue as a right wing conspiracy.
Aside from that, I never mentioned adam, who is paranoid again?
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...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".
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.
> Seriously, how much value does a week-old news article have nowadays?
It can be used as the basis of the average Slashdot post?
I wrote it, I retain copyright, it is mine.
Not yours. Not "society's".
Mine.
Enjoy your dada-esque experiment with scissors and eink.
A) I read the article. Go screw.
B) Yes. Some bloggers have been stealing AP content and then collecting advertising revenue from the work of AP staff. I call that theft.
C) Yes. I mean DRM "that works". I am believe that DRM hardware based solutions are workable and will take hold in the market at some point in the future. I used to oppose such an outcome. Not any longer.
D) I'd like a non-polluting free energy solution too. But it looks like nuclear reclamation is the only solution to that problem. Unfortunately, now we're off-topic.
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.
Wow man, that's twice now you've used bold, and twice now it's been the same word. "Mine".
Get over yourself. I hate to break this to you, but you are not self contained. You've used my roads, you've used my air to breathe, and you're using my internet RIGHT NOW.
I say these things are 'my' things, because I have a sense of community, of being an integral (look up the meaning if you feel snide when reading that) member of society. Society, which is mine, and to which I belong, built those things. Society laid the groundwork for you to write that 'interesting' little porno of yours.
I'm not saying that you're incorrect in stating that your copyrighted work isn't yours, but the bold text on that word 'mine' repeatedly points to a disturbing sociopathy that I think you should ponder well. If you think everything you've ever done is ascribable to only your own brilliance, you're both wrong and short-sighted. Think about how being an actual member of society effects you, and has effected you all of your life before going off on someone so strongly about what's "Mine."
Unless you're one of those baby-boomers that George Carlin informs us have a philosophy of 'GIMME IT, IT'S MINE'. If that's the case, then nevermind, get what you can before you become irrelevant.
I could not disagree more with your armchair psychology and simplistic ethics.
Yup, I give that away with a Creative Commons license. That license requires those who republish to include full attribution and not change the content in any way.
You have broken my copyright license and thus duplicated that content illegally.
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.
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.
apparently you feel entitled to own things you sold to other people just because youre a writer.
I think the people who built your house should be allowed to firebomb various rooms because they dont like how you use them, and you should be presumed guilty until proven innocent on this regard so you have no recourse when they do so.
now die in a fire you disgusting parasite on the back of society. I have plenty of karma to burn, and i'm happy to do it to out one of the few disgusting corruptors of society who believe in forcing DRM down our collective throats.
and again and again until people learn to stop silencing this with troll mods.
DRM is a plague on society, and this guy feels he has a right to our liberty, so I will continue to repeat this until it is left alone.
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www.unassociatedpress.net has now come online to consolidate the story and gather news as well as petition...
Oh yes. There is no end to the ways that people can steal, regardless of whether the item is a physical object or copyrighted content. That's why law enforcement exists.