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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why? I know liberals and conservatives who like it - if nothing else, for the bizarre links. Helps fill in when Slashdot gets slow...
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
...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.
>> > 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 fair use. The copyright statutes are pretty clear that fair use is quoting in the context of doing something like criticism, comment, or teaching. Simply copying without adding something is called republishing, and that isn't covered by fair use.
>> > 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.
Of course they're not - they are putting online their own original reporting and work. If someone doesn't do that, there isn't going to be anything worth quoting in the first place.
> Seriously, how much value does a week-old news article have nowadays?
It can be used as the basis of the average Slashdot post?
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.