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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
Maybe they're like the NN equivalent of an AC on SD or something.
AP = Associated Press, the biggest, baddest news syndicate out there.
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
The CB App. What's your 20?
It's the The Associated Press, a wire service.
... 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.
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
Indeed. I'd quote the relevant passage from the AP Stylebook regarding the use of abbreviations, but they seem to have locked it up behind a paid-content wall.
Take THAT, thriving black market for standard news industry reference materials!
Associated Press. (%Insert link to Wikipedia article.%) (%Insert random fact or two about AP.%) (%Insert funny comment to try and get modded up.%)
Ah, thank god for my Slashdot comment template engine.
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
You answered your own question.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I say we call Bruce Willis now, and worry about the lawsuit later!
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
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.
There's a point where the ubiquity of an acronym is so much that it doesn't NEED explaining. Do you need me to type that I live in the United States of America (USA)? Or would you get it from the context of what I was saying because it's a common acronym? The AP has been around for so long and has it's name in so many places that I'd think almost all people reading it would know it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I know your being cynical, but if you:
a) answered the question
b) put interesting facts in
c) put relevant link in
d) entertain people in the process
Hell, you deserve to be modded up.
This post meets a & d, but misses b and c so should still do ok. But overuse this particular d and it will cease to entertain which just leaves a, and there is no shortage of a's, which means this template, if it remains unfilled will start out funny, but as the funny wears off your moderation will trend towards redundant. ;)
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.
When all else fails, sue everyone!
Standard disclaimer: IANAL
"Not-for-profit" != "takes in no money".
Not-for-profit is more of a legal/accounting designation than a vow of poverty, and lawsuits are often to get an court ruling against improper/undesirable behavior, rather than win lots of money.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I'd just like to hear it from the person actually doing it, in order to decide how to respond. Why would someone want to bypass a user's preference to not see signatures, especially since it requires extra work?
There is a script floating around which will automatically insert a sig on slashdot posts. It doesn't have to require ongoing work.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Ok, let's check the wikipedia article:
The Associated Press (AP) is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States
Perhaps this is the reason that I had never heard about "AP"? It's not being used outside your country, but I suppose USA means "The World". I guess you'll wake up sooner or later.
c++;
The signature in question appears to be an advertisement for a web site. Advertisers in general try to force people to see their ads. In other words, the signature is spam, and typing it by hand (or script) bypasses the spam filter.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The AP operates globally.
I remember it well - I was an AP stringer for 12 years, and we covered news (and provided news to outlets) across the world.
Siting Wikipedia for this is just silly. Did you even think to check the AP website?
From http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html
243 bureaus in 97 countries.
1,700 U.S. daily, weekly, non-English and college newspapers.
5,000 radio and television outlets taking AP services.
850 AP Radio News audio affiliates.
550 International broadcasters who receive AP's global video news service, APTN, and SNTV, a sports joint venture video service.
121 number of countries served by AP
4 languages in which AP sends news. The report is translated into many more languages by international subscribers.
4,100 AP editorial, communications and administrative employees worldwide.
3,000 of AP's worldwide staff are journalists.
49 Pulitzer Prizes, including 30 for photography.
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey