AP Says "Share Your Revenue, Or Face Lawsuits"

eldavojohn writes "The Associated Press is starting to feel the bite of the economic recession and said on Monday that they will 'work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.' They are talking about everything from search engines to aggregators that link to news articles and some sites that reproduce the whole news article. The article notes that in Europe legislative action has blocked Google from using news articles from some outlets similar to what was discussed here last week."

Comments

AP Is Pricing Itself Out Of the Blog Market

[ausoleil]

I work on a popular sports blog and also another up and coming blog, and both feature commentary on relevant news (college sports and golf.)

We would love to use AP content for our blogs, with proper uasge, citations, trackbacks and the like. So we try to contact AP for licensing information and cannot reach a human and get no call back for weeks.

When they do return our inquiries, they gave us a price so ridiculous that it was impossible to fit it into any workable revenue model. It's not that we are cheap or expected something for nothing, it's just that they wanted a fee so high that it just couldn't be done.

We came away with a definite impression that AP didn't *want* to work with us and that their numbers were just go-away-leave-us-alone figures that they knew they had little chance of getting a sale from.

Now we avoid their material like the plague.

What profit?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.

Um, the AP isn't really run for profit, silly. It's a cooperative of news organizations that exists to allow its members to share stories, so the papers can publish stories about regions where they don't have reporters. All of the AP's valuable content is supplied by the members. In effect, the AP and the other news agencies are the first news aggregators.