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Court Upholds AP "Quasi-Property" Rights On Hot News
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A federal court ruled that the AP can sue competitors for 'quasi-property' rights on hot news, as well as for copyright infringement and several other claims. The so-called 'hot news' doctrine was created by a judge 90 years ago in another case, where the AP sued a competitor for copying wartime reporting and bribing its employees to send them a copy of unreleased news. The courts' solution was to make hot news a form of 'quasi-property' distinct from copyright, in part because facts cannot be copyrighted. But now the AP is making use of the precedent again, going after AHN which competes with the AP, alleging that they're somehow copying the AP's news. The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it."
Instead of this fancy legal term of "hot news", I use another term for what AHN is doing to AP: "plagiarism". According to nolo:
putting your name on someone else's work is still plagiarism and is unethical within artistic, scientific, academic and political communities
I guess the press is not one of those communities. I'm not a big fan of lawsuits: I was sued once by a company that wanted to put me out of business and they almost succeeded. Being right doesn't matter, it's whoever has the deepest pockets.
So in this case, I'd much rather have the community (the readers) shun AHN. It's important for everyone to know what is going on, and let the public make their own choices.
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
What the hell is "AP"? It's common practice to at least explain the acronym once in a text. As of now, this blurb means nothing without following the links. Is AP a person (unlikely because of the age, but still)? A company? A newspaper?
c++;
... I'm about to be sued by Associated Press for this hot news item. More at 11
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
If it can be taken, copied, borrowed, whatever - it will be. It is not physically or technically possible to prevent this from happening.
That means you are left with civil court remedies, which generally take too long to get anywhere and the penalties may be wholly out of line with the benefits. Basically, you can drive your competitors out of a billion-dollary business and get fined a million dollars. Sounds like a great business plan.
Alternatively, civil court remedies can be wholly out of line the other way, where the benefit to the offender is $1000 and they have to pay a $250,000 fine.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
Let us all fight for our quasi-rights while living under this quasi-dictatorship.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Covering the same story is not necessarily plagiarism, copying it verbatim would come directly under copyright but AFAICT that's not the case at issue.
Anyway:
The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it.
It made for a good joke but the AP doesn't seem to be covering this story (I was going to post the link but I can't find one).
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
The press isn't one of those communities because the press doesn't deal in the kinds of concepts you can plagiarize. If AHN copied AP text verbatim, you might say that they plagiarized the writing, but then they would get sued for copyright infringement. But they are merely stating the same fact as a fact stated in an AP news story, and it's a fact that, unlike a scientific experiment, didn't require creativity to observe--it merely required presence.
So, I don't think it's plagiarism.
from Harvad Law (emphasis mine):
But this doesn't really matter anyway, since if you read on in the link I provided, you'll see that federal common law was abolished, so what matters is the specific state law. New York common law establishes strict criteria for the application of the misappropriation doctrine to "hot news" (see National Basketball Ass'n v. Sports Team Analysis & Tracking Systems, Inc. [warning: site is ugly as sin] for how a recent plaintiff's claim was found to be lacking)... and this seems to meet all of it. It made me chuckle, however, that in that link one of the biggest supporters of the defendant in that case was the AP.
At any rate, I think we need to have either sweeping federal law specifically creating this property, or we need to have no right to "hot news" as quasi-property. The problem with the latter is then there is no incentive to do fact reporting at all, since it would be impossible to recoup the costs of it. The idealist in me says "Boo to treating information as property" but the realist in me says "Yay to having paid reporters".
Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news they want us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news THEY want us to see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'm just curious as to why you manually add a signature to your postings (a link to some website), rather than use the standard signature mechanism that automatically adds it, and allows a reader to disable all signatures if he is not interested in them.
Just imagine...
Massive Asteroid Headed for Earth.
In other news: AP victorious in pre-publication motion to prevent competitors from carrying asteroid story.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
We have IP for a reason: it helps make social structures work better. As a society, we make a little deal, and that deal is a different in each of the 3 broad categories of IP protection: copyright & trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
In the copyright area, the deal works like this: the Content Creator gets a limited time right to exclusively control profits, distribution, performance, derivatives and use of the work they create as a proxy for the "property right" they would normally get to claim if they had created a physical thing. In return for this exclusive control, the Content Creator gets both benefits, but also pays a downside. The benefit is they get to profit and control the results of their efforts. The downside is that after that limited time is over, the information always gets released to the society at large. In the long run, society benefits from this deal in two ways: it promotes the creation of works based on information: digital media, software, literature, music, movies, etc. ...in today's world - most everything relating to media, computers, and electronic art. The second, important benefit is that society gets all the information after the limited time is over. It all becomes public domain.
Copyright is good, and we need it. Many have argued and manipulated the system to change the amount of time - but that is another story. Many have argued about how much of what one creates can be controlled, and how - and we have fair use cases that cover exactly that.
So we already have the deal. The deal works (some might argue poorly). I don't see a valid need for another, different deal.
Just because AP runs a large business and spends money doesn't mean they (or anyone) can cut a new deal. In this case, the whole idea of "hot news" is about controlling very specific, small pieces of information: scores, facts, headlines. In my opinion after a very brief read: the balance between what is good of society and what is good for the Content Creator is not met.
From the fine article:
The AP notes that AHN has no news operation at all, and says its employees just browse the Internet scooping up AP copy and re-writing it.
This dude notes that /. has no news operation at all, and says its employees just browse the Firehose scooping up submissions and re-writing it.
So what's new again? Isn't that how most internet publications work anyway? Some organization discovers, and publishes a new / unknown fact, and it gets copied over and over by countless others who didn't do the gruntwork themselves. If that's all that AHN is doing, then they're allways behind on the stories, right? And isn't that the added value for the party (AP) that has the scoops, that their readers get it first?
Unpublished news is like unpublished scientific discoveries or product developments. Trade secrets are property of the employer and the employee giving them to anyone else is simple theft and the receiver is at least a receiver of stolen goods, or may be complicit in the theft.
How can a republisher have any advantage? They have to change the words, most likely reducing accuracy. If they can prepare a prettier presentation, then they've added value.
I just thought I should point that out. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own. Sharing does not imply plagiarism. The vast majority of copyright infringement is *not* plagiarism.
One of the foundations of international copyright (and an aspect of it not strongly respected by the United States) is moral rights, including the right of the author to be given credit. I find it ironic that vigorous enforcement of copyright actually creates an incentive for sharers and borrowers to obscure the source or credit of material. This makes their activity harder to detect, and easier for them to defend ("I got this from AP" is kind of a dead giveaway).
If copyright law was closer to actual social practice, this kind of plagiarism would likely be much less common.
Personally, I find clear cases of plagiarism to be utterly dishonest and far worse than sharing.
They print it in their respective papers. Which one gets sued?
What?
"we won't link to it."
I know you are making a joke, but we shouldn't participate in this bullshit by limiting what we publish.
When all else fails, sue everyone!
...legislate from the bench.
Seriously, where's the statutory basis for this new property right? Or did they pull all of this stuff directly out of their ass?
It's four thirty a.m. and the house is asleep.
I. . . am not asleep.
I am crouched in the bathtub in a frog-like stance, small puddles of urine and liquid shit at my feet. I'm leaning forward, gripping the side of the tub and biting my knee, overwhelmed by a mixture of pain and pleasure as I piston a dildo in and out of my ass.
You see, I really love anal masturbation.
Ever try it? No? You should.
Doesn't matter who you are. God gave all of us, male and female, an abundance of nerve endings in our rectum - and one life to live. So why don't you go ahead and test out the equipment? Have some fun. No point in having a gun sitting on your shelf your entire life and never killing anyone, right?
But I realize there's a fairly persistent misconception among guys that I'm gonna have to dispel before we go any further:
Stimulating your own ass is not "gay."
That notion doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, how could anything you do to your own body be gay? Nobody ever freaks out in the middle of jerking off like "Holy fuck, I've got a fistful of cock! I've gotta cut this gay shit out!" Well, what's the philosophical difference between playing with your dick and playing with your ass?
There is none.
Look fellas, here's the scoop:
If you have a girl wearing a foot long strap-on, smacking your face and screaming "WHO'S MY BITCH?!?" while she pounds your asshole until it bleeds, that would be a *heterosexual* act. Girl on guy. Simple.
Now if it's a guy that's fucking you, that would be homosexual. And if you're doing it to yourself, well, that's plain old masturbation.
But listen - if you're still sitting there being stubborn, all macho and uptight going "My ass. . . is EXIT ONLY!!!" then lemme just ask you a question.
You know that feeling you get when you take a really big shit?
You know what I'm talking about. You're sitting on the couch, eating Cheez-Its and watching Larry King, when all of the sudden you feel that familiar burning. . . so you get up and bound off to the bathroom all bow legged, clenching your sphincter real tight, and then you furiously rip off your boxer briefs and plop down on the seat just in time to let a huuuuuuge thick turd come sliding out of your ass?
Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!
That feeling.
That tingling, chills up your spine, this-is-absolutely-the-pinnacle-of-human-existence feeling.
Well guess what. That's the feeling of a massive rod moving through your rectum, tickling those wonderfully abundant nerve endings. You love it. It's okay. We all do. It doesn't make you a fag. Or at the very least, we're ALL fags. So indulge yourself.
(Yes, I understand that said feeling is partially due to the sensory experience of toxins leaving the body, which is unique to defecation - but the operative word here is "partially." You like the log movement, too. Don't try to argue.)
So anyway, now that you've decided to be bold, and not a homophobic pussy, and poke around the cornhole a little bit - good for you. But there's something you should remember. Anal masturbation is just like playing the accordion, or shooting a jumper, or really anything else that's worth doing. That is, it requires practice.
You see, back when I was a kid I would get curious and stick a finger or a toothbrush up there, but I wasn't fucking around with anywhere near the kind of pleasure I'm achieving now. It was uncomfortable even. So I worked on it.
And conversely, I know I'm still far from expertise in this particular discipline. I don't claim to be an ass master. There's a whole world of lengths, girths, textures, and vibrations that my eager browneye has yet to inhale.
But since I have honed my skills to a pretty decent level, I'll share with you my current technique. Without further ado:
Anonymous Coward's Anal Masturbation Technique
What You Need:
1. Lubricant of your choice
2. Fake cock (eight inches, approx.)
3. Ridged anal wand (seven inches, approx.)
Procedure:
Neither. RTFA.
a "hot news" misappropriation claim is viable when:
(i) a plaintiff generates or gathers information at a cost; ...
(iii) a defendant's use of the information constitutes free riding on the plaintiff's efforts; ...
If they're reading the AP's articles, then altering them, why doesn't the AP have a copyright claim that the AHI's articles are derivative works of the AP's?
You're incorrect. The first story has a link to the AP story which is here.
I just hope they don't sue me for that.
Simple really.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...and when its in, I'll read all about it in the,....er,.....um.....
Well, maybe not.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ok, so they can sue over "hot news" which means every last one of us can sue over hot news as well if it happens to be our own. This means that if the AP were to pick up a story off of a blog and use it without permission, we have their nuts in a vise. And the AP indeed have "borrowed" hot news from bloggers without attribution or compensation.
They don't realize it but now blogging just became a cash-grab with AP as the main sugar-mama.
They print it in their respective papers. Which one gets sued?
Both of them?
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
To be perfectly redundant, as a whole lot of others have said, that would be called plagiarism, pawning off somebody else's work as your own. Either way, I believe the dissenting opinion to be the correct one. Chalk it up as another failure of majority rule.
What?
Thanks, I guess it's because the story is a week old!
I didn't try to look that far back, their search interface isn't very useful.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
e) say something about the post being modded up. It's sort of like a reverse Fight Club, or a reverse "first rule": if you want to be modded up, always talk about being modded up.
It also seems to work backwards, too. If you want your post to be modded up, the magic words are, "I know I'll be modded down for this, but..."
Like this post, for example. I know it will be modded down. Nobody would ever mod it funny or insightful.
Unethical, yes, but that's policed, to the extent that it is, by professional communities among themselves. If someone proves an important new theorem, and I claim to prove the same theorem the same way the next month, no reputable math journal would publish my plagiarized paper. But if I put a PDF online, I wouldn't be committing a crime, either.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was sued once by a company that wanted to put me out of business and they almost succeeded.
So what happened?
P/S: I can't find your email address in your website.
> Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news they
> want us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news THEY want us to
> see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
That's golden. Thanks, I've stored it in my personal cache.
Although I might have rephrased it as:
Nowadays, it'd be more like
Rogue Astronomer selling details about Massive Asteroid Headed for Earth on Ebay
or maybe
Rogue Astronomer in Jail; only willing to give Asteroid Details directly to the President
The facts here are not quite so apparent and the Associated Press is certainly making a public case, I think that a jury would not be so favourable to them.
I read AP and AHN. and I don't find similarities and certainly can't see that the AHN service is simply lifting the Associated Press' stories.
Part of the lawsuit was that AP complained that AHN was including in a story a journalistic type attribution of "according to the AP" or something. AP complained and sued them for that too.
What this really looks like is the AP throwing its weight around yet again and sueing what is almost certainly a much smaller competitor in hopes to gain by threat and weight of litigation that to which it is not entitled legally, or morally.
This assualt, and AP's other initiatives recently, ie "Don't quote us" or 5 words costs $12.50 and the whole drudgereport.com debacle show that the AP has an agenda that runs counter to what is for the greater good, most certainly what is good for the internet.
Here are some really good articles
Is the AP Good For America?: a great overview of what the Associated Press has truly become.
Maybe the Associated Press need the type of bad PR smack down that only the internet can provide?
I've put a copy of the decision (PDF) online.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
They mostly just repackage press releases from the government and corporations. If they were just a service to let news papers share content with each other, that would be one thing. Instead they are driving local reporting out of business.
With the Internet we have no need for media outlets. I have a news feed of hundreds of sites that brings all the data into a single reader. There is no reason to have some talking head between us and the news anymore.
Hot News is really really bad law. Why can't we call our congressmen and tell them that this Quasi property right in Hot News is really bad for America. Isn't it strange that it's only really allowed in NY? http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt Use that Link, find your Congressional Rep, Call Them and tell them that something needs to be done and that this is really bad.