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

If you don't want people looking at it

[Alarindris]

don't put it on the friggin internet!

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[interkin3tic]

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.

If they succeed in this, the only thing that will happen is that some of my news portals will have less actual content and more blogging/editorials/crap (like fashion and celeb news).

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Asic Eng]

I think they have a case when talking about "sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole" - it's clearly unfair to do that.

However to asking money from sites that merely link to the articles? That seems over the top and counter-productive. After all that brings traffic to the site which hosts the article. Linking itself must be free speech, and using the headline and 1-2 sentences in order to describe the link must be fair use.

One goal of The A.P. and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are "the original source or the most authoritative source," not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.

That goal is ok, but they have no right to prevent a search engine from giving the user the site they are most likely looking for. If that's a site discussing the news, rather than the site presenting the news, they can address this by making their own sites more attractive. In any case - they get a link out of it.

Other than that: if you really don't want to be indexed (and not just pretend you don't because you want to get money from the search engines) then just use robots.txt.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[NeutronCowboy]

Then I would suggest expanding your news gathering. BBC, NPR, CNN and NYT all have excellent pieces of investigative journalism. Is everything on their sites or in their papers solid, investigative journalism? Of course not. But to say "virtually everything is fluff news" betrays more your lack of reading than a lack of good journalism.

Legislative remedies? Yuck.

[tepples]

AP wrote:

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."

Re:Wither into irrelevence.

[interkin3tic]

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?

Robots.txt doesn't work?

[forand]

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.

Re:Why didn't they adapt?

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

flawed by design

[Demonantis]

The internet was not built with bussiness models in mind. Unfortunately, businesses think they can shoehorn a model onto the interenet.

Are you really that stupid

[wiredog]

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?

Re:Are you really that stupid

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Hmmm... I think it's a little more than that. At least, they're specifically picking on Google in the summary's synopsis of the article. And why?

When I look at Google News, I see a page of links, the titles of which are almost entirely just headlines. The few that aren't just headlines include only a sentence or two from the article. How is this not fair use? And how is the AP entitled to any compensation for this? If you truly want to know more, you'll click on a link and, if it's an AP story, be sent to an AP website where you will get both the full article and the AP's ads.

For site's which don't play nice, ripping whole articles or outright plagiarism, then go ahead, bring down the hammer. But that's not a new problem. This, on the other hand, sounds an awful lot like the AP going for a money grab while waving a big lawyer stick. And what's worse is that they might succeed because the courts have time and again shown questionable judgment when it comes to cases involving linking and fair use.

AP Killed Printed News

[Thelasko]

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.

Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[jgalun]

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?

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[whiledo]

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 was agreeing with you up until this point.

Most people's problems with the MPAA has been with their willingness to fight technology rather than embrace it, often by using the laws they have paid to have put in place. They strive to not even try new methods of movie delivery, such as releasing a film at the same time on PPV as in theaters, easy non-DRM encumbered downloads for a less than a rental, etc. These other methods might fail, but the MPAA (or the studios that make it up) haven't even really experimented in these areas.

I know you didn't bring it up, but the RIAA is another example. Not only do you have the abusive legal stuff, but you have the fact that they are really just a layer of lawyers, managers and distributors that are no longer as crucial to their industry as they once were. They have done more to try releasing their content in new ways, but they still only do it begrudgingly and so they wind up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the whole fact that for all these years, the only way to legally purchase music from a lot of popular artists was to buy into the whole iTunes+DRM bullshit. They only wanted to shift their business model if it would still give all the useless people the same fat paychecks as they had always gotten, without paying the actual content creators a nickel more.

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[PhxBlue]

And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?

This is a strawman. No one's advocating the practice of copying and pasting entire AP articles. Read the fscking article (or at least the summary) -- the AP is talking about demanding fees for Web sites who link to their stories or copy and paste excerpts with links to the full stories.

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?

Traditional journalists look down upon bloggers, but sometimes the only difference is that one group uses the Associated Press Stylebook and the other doesn't. I think you'll discover that if "traditional" newspapers go away, communities will step in to fill the void.

Almost sad

[dwhitaker]

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.

Re:Easy steps

[elrous0]

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!

Re:Why didn't they adapt?

[digitig]

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.