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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."
don't put it on the friggin internet!
and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.
"Legal remedies" == we'll sue; easy enough. But what worries most is "legislative remedies". It reeks of "We know you're playing by the rules, but we don't like the rules, so we'll buy off a few senators to get the rules changed."
The suits just don't understand that traffic is the new black.
No, black is still black. How many sites get tons of hits but no actual profits?
AP may be hurting themselves by doing this, or they may have, you know, actually studied their own buisness and concluded that this is how they will survive. We'll get to see for ourselves. Or not, since if they go under, who is going to report it? AP news?
This is very confusing to me. If websites don't want aggregators to compile all of their content for them and place it in a convenient (for the viewer) format and location then they should just make their robots.txt act accordingly.
Unfortunately this appears to be a money grab and if there was and doubt in my mind about that it was removed when they stated '[we] will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't [license].' Making new laws to maintain your revenue stream is a clear sign to me that you do not have a viable business model and are attempting to make things criminal without a valid reason.
From the article:
I think we can discount the second option.
1 - Tell someone a story. 2 - Wait till he tells the same story to someone else. 3 - Sue.
A great plan indeed. I can't foresee any way it may fail.
I think it's kind of different. They are gaining revenue for telling the story. And it's not fictional ... and they will be held accountable if they get some facts wrong. And also that's how they make their money.
A more accurate analogy (though still flawed) would be:
1 - Do a lot of footwork to find the facts and tell them to someone to make a tiny sum of money.
2 - Wait till he tells the same story to 10,000 other people with your exact words and little to no attribution to you and he makes a nominal sum of money.
3 - Sue.
Not really a plan, as step 2 requires action on someone else's part. Hey, I don't predict this to fail the way the MPAA/RIAA are being backed by congress and the courts. Legal or legislative action is at the AP's disposal.
My work here is dung.
Why did so many big companies get caught out by the internet? They had the capital, and the human resources to do something, but they just sat there and let it hit them with full force.
It wasn't like it crept up on them overnight!
It is really simple, under the companies' pre-Internet business model they made $X. Under every Internet business model anyone could come up with they would make at best $.0X. They continued using the pre-Internet business model as long as they could, hoping that someone would come up with an Internet business model that would allow them to make $X. It hasn't happened.
These companies that got caught out by the Internet are in businesses that just don't have the potential to make the kind of money they are used to in the Internet age.
These businesses used to have high barriers to entry. The Internet eliminated those barriers to entry.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The internet was not built with bussiness models in mind. Unfortunately, businesses think they can shoehorn a model onto the interenet.
Yea, they should have surveyed the slashdot pundits instead.
t
They do want people looking at, they just want to be paid for their work. You know:
"Information wants to be free, but information purveyors want to be paid."
Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?
Best Slashdot Co
The reason you hear stories about newspapers failing all over the country is because of the Associated Press. In order to cut costs, newspapers across the country eliminated most of their reporting staff and replaced them with AP newsfeeds. Instead of doing real reporting, they just "rip and read" from the AP feed.
The advent of the internet has given us access to many more news sources than we ever had before. Most of us have realized that all of the news papers have the same stories, word for word. This is why they are going out of business. If newspapers, and other news sources, are going to stay in business, they need to provide valuable content. They need to stop relying on the AP for content, we can get that anywhere.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
So far, as expected, every comment is about how stupid these old media dinosaurs are to repeat the mistakes of the RIAA/MPAA.
Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from? And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?
I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
I would point out that Slashdot is an Aggregator with comment posting. It generates no actual news stories itself.
It is almost sad to see the professional journalism dying - or at least having the traditional roles it took in society go the way of the dinosaurs. 15 years from now, the news market will be a much different place, and I hope we figure out a way to have integrity and accountability in the new model. I do find it odd though that some industries who fail to adapt get government funds while others, who could arguably provide a public service, are left out to dry.
Douglas Whitaker
1) Refuse to let Google and other search engines index your stories
2) Google removes all newspapers with AP content from its indexing
3) Newspapers, with falling print sales and no Google presence, go out of business
4) No one left to buy AP stories
5) ???
6) Profit!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It works more like this:
Someone creates some content for a website. Their revenue is based on the number of people visiting the site.
Someone else comes along and aggregates multiple websites. Instead of people visiting the original site, they start to visit the aggregator because it's more convenient. The aggregator gets the views and the advertising money.
The content creators lose out, even though they create the content.
The argument from the aggregator site is that it pushes viewers to sites that they would never normally visit. E.g., a person in Florida may never read an Oklahoma newspaper unless there was a link somewhere on an aggregator.
Sometimes it balances out, but more and more, it's in favor of the aggregator.
I think eventually content will be separated from the presentation. Companies like the AP, like the local Herald, will switch from providing a newspaper or website into providing a standard feed, and charging based on that feed. This is very similar to how other media is shopped around.
There's a danger in that news will also become indistinguishable from entertainment (it's almost there already), but that may be the only way the newspapers can survive.
AP's barrier to entry wasn't distribution, it was a worldwide network of skilled journalists. The Internet hasn't removed that barrier to entry, because bloggers on the ground don't have the detachment and big-picture view of the skilled journalist, and rarely have the writing skills. If anything is damaging AP's business model, it's not the barriers to entry, it's whether the product (informed, well written journalism) is in demand nowadays.
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Given these two historical points -- as well as the tendency towards zero marginal cost for reproduction and distribution of digital content, I personally don't think micropayments make sense.
I like to visit "real" newspaper sites that have good discussion systems. Almost all of the local newspapers in Seattle have horrible comment systems that are tucked a way in such a fashion that only real nutcases seem to inhabit them.
Worse, they all seem to use digg-style "up/down" moderation. "Up/Down" moderation is horrible for anything outside product reviews. It creates a feedback loop where those that go with the group think get rewarded with "+55" and those who go against get shunned at "-11" with no way to get out of the hole.
Slashdot may not be perfect, but after using dozens if not hundreds of other discussion systems, they do have pretty much the best out there. DailyKos is close second, but only because a limited set of users can down-rate a comment and even those users can only dish out a couple down-rates a day. Anything that grants regular users the ability to make an unlimited number of down-rates will quickly turn into a cesspool of wackos.
So yeah, newspaper sites could learn a thing or two by ripping some of what slashdot does right. Slashdot could do the same and finally add a rich text editor to the comments so I can finally highlight a string of words and make it a link...but that is a different story :-)
It's not that the newspapers don't want Google linking to their website. They want the ad revenue of course. They just want Google to pay for the privilege of linking to their website as well. Think of ISPs who want you to pay for an Internet connection and then want websites to pay for a premium connection to your system.
This is probably why AP is going about it, rather than an individual newspaper. If an individual newspaper complains to Google, Google will simply remove them from being listed. The newspaper loses to their rivals and no one gets the double dip. If legislation required Google to link to the newspapers and pay a small fee every time someone clicked on a link, I think AP would be happy. If Google was not required to link to the newspapers, it probably would just link to the websites of a country which didn't have this legislation. It's pretty much asking Google to subsidize the newspaper industry. I'm not a supporter of this.
They're giving you the price it costs to pay the human cost (salaries, benefits, travel costs) of reporting the news you say you want to give your readers. It's not cheap.
It is cheap when they're selling the exact same information to every newspaper on the planet...