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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."
Go ahead, AP! Cut yourself off and fall more into irrelevence... The suits just don't understand that traffic is the new black.
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!
Oh well. Some AP reporting has been kind of shitty in the last 10 years or so, anyway.
It is rather amazing that right after the RIAA experiemce proves that this is a spectacularly bad idea, the AP dusts it off and tries it on. Don't these guys read the news?
So if I were to set up a website that let people put rss feeds of their choice on a portal page - and then added advertising of my own to that same page - and the user decided to choose one of these:
RSS Feeds
I'd be open to a lawsuit?
What if I then created a link that said "Get all the Associated Press RSS feeds" which then did the copy/paste for the user and created a page for them of all the above feeds?
Then based on user activity I found that every user (99.5%) was clicking that auto-AP button... so to provide good customer service I just added tabs to my interface with one of them being "AP News" by default.
All this while, the pages only show the Title, summary, attribution, date and a link to the original article.
So then I get sued... right?
What if I just made "widgets" that people could download to their Widget product of choice? How about a desktop application that does the same thing - ad free - but has a purchase price attached?
Any thoughts?
My current Mail program allows me to consume RSS feeds, as do a variety of widgets (online and off) and none of them are non-commercial and I'm fairly certain that none of them are paying the AP any license fee.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
A more accurate analogy (though still flawed) would be:
1 - Do some footwork to find stories that don't go against government policy or big business interests 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.
Fixed that for you..
Possible shortcuts to #1 include
Using whatever they're spoon-fed by big business or the government.
Writing a story with no actual facts but mentioning terrorism, child porn or any of the other current scare tactic buzzwords.
Oh, do you really think news was ever such a lucrative racket?
The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US. A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it. I am starting to think we need some new law, like more stringent copyright within the first 24 hours after publication.
The issue isn't so much linking to AP stories or posting a quote or headline from an AP article, it's reproducing entire articles without permission.
I don't see how people can justify wholesale theft of other people's work in this way. Investigative journalism is not cheap, if you can't pay the wages of your journalists, they're not going to go to Afghanistan or to a disaster area and put their lives at risk.
It's not about using an outdated business model or anything like that. There are no AP concerts, no AP videogames, they have very few avenues to generate income. If their work gets stolen, not only is someone profiting from their work, they're taking revenue from them and their partners.
Nobody wants news. They want confirmation of their beliefs. The AP could be replaced by a script with modules for "foreign policy", "taxation", "civil rights", and "human interest", and nobody would notice.
It's even more ridiculous and pathological than that: the AP is simultaneously whining about how aggregators link to their articles and also about how search engines DON'T link to their articles. This is typical schizophrenia from an industry that is in hysterical denial because the world has changed and their business model no longer works. They can't even articulate what they want; they just want to go back to the way things used to be, when Mommy used to play with them and feed them all day. Embarrassingly infantile.
A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it.
How many of those are there in the "real news?" Virtually everything is commercial or government "press releases" and "fluff news." The only leg work I see (as an outsider) are embedded reporters in various wars -which, for all their impartiality, are probably just as easily paid by the military.
I would pay for a news source that was just "investigative journalism," but why would I pay for 99.9% press releases and some "commentary" thrown in?
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it. I am starting to think we need some new law, like more stringent copyright within the first 24 hours after publication.
Obviously only a REAL reporter could cover something like SCO vs IBM. So PJ from Groklaw for example isn't worth the time to read. Snark.
Considering how 24 hour news networks (aka CNN) have been around for almost 30 years, and they have never managed to have any sort of investigative reporting, I think the decline of "real news" was a problem long before the internet hit the mainstream.
I think the Internet is going to bring us much better investigative reporters than we could ever expect from the traditional media. Michael Yon is an excellent example of what we can expect from the modern internet investigative reporter.
IMHO, it all started when the newspapers started to favor the wire services over their own reporting. They had to pay into it anyways, and paying the wire service fees could be cheaper than providing your reporter a desk, car, phone, etc, etc, etc. Oh ya, and their paycheck.
Most websites and even print papers, are full of wire stories that they didn't originate. Those stories did start somewhere, but.....
Then again, how many papers, TV stations, and web publications need to send their own reporters out to cover the same story? It's cheaper and easier to send one out and let everyone copy the story for a few bucks (going to AP/Reuters/UPI/or whoever)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
As someone whose formative newspaper, and other news source, reading years were essentially from 2001-2006, I must completely and totally disagree with you.
I'm not sure exactly what newspaper values were in the later decades of the twentieth century. But I certainly do know what they are in the early years of the 21st. They are the values of the establishment, as newspapers in particular are a central and inextricable part of the establishment. I watched paper after paper after paper, day after day after day, tow the party line, stifle dissent, spin stories upside down, manufacture controversy, manufacture consent, treat the powerful with kid gloves, and viciously destroy those who could not defend themselves.
In 2003, literally millions of people marched against the war in Iraq while not one major newspaper went against it. Every last prominent newspaper in the western world supported that war. In the aftermath, they continued to support it. Amid the scandals and lies that followed it, they still supported it, and freely repeated the excuses for the excuses for the excuses. They were all little more than government press sectrecaries, the world over.
And it's not just the war. That was only the most grievous failing of the newspaper industry. When it came to the financial industry, to the graft, to the unjust laws, to the violations of the rule of law, I can't recall a single serious newspaper investigation into anything aside from sex scandals and knife crime. How many important stories have we seen posted on Slashdot that will never, ever see the front, or any other, page of any national or international newspaper. Newspapers are toothless, only having fangs for those who they know cannot fight back. They have not, in my memory, ever seriously attacked those in secure positions of power. Ever.
I open up a newspaper and all I see is district court case reports, astroturf, human interest stories, AP stories and sports news. Oh and opinion. Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion. Commentary and analysis from wholly unqualified windbags, and every letter of it bought and paid for.
You ask me why the newspaper industry is failing? The Internet!? Not likely. The reason they are failing is because they have failed to provide news, the "real news" you claim they still offer. They don't. Newspapers and the entire media industry have offered an entire generation nothing but tripe, gossip and the offical government line, and in so doing they have lost that generation. Probably forever.
I will certainly never again relay on any mainstream media for my information, on anything. I have, for all my formative news-reading years, relied on the Internet as a source of information. Poor as it is, it has served me better than any official publication. And it has served others in the same way. Others from my generation and probably from two others.
A demographic spanning some 20 years for whom newspapers, raid and television have been, are and will always be and unreliable sources of information. This is not some problem for young "pinkos" or anarchists who will turn to the Village Magazine or Indymedia or what have you for their news. No. The problems in the contemporary media are so deep, so systemic, and so pervasive across the entire political spectrum of the industry, that the young readers who have had to put up with them will never again turn to any outlet proclaiming itself to be an official or unofficial source of news. For them, journalism is a disreputable occupation, and anyone claiming to be one will always be suspect. They turn instead to the bloggers, and nobodies, and part time commentators. People untainted by a corrupt occupation or ind
May the Maths Be with you!
With the advent of mass media (TV, Cable, and now Internet) a good investigative journalist only gets one story. After that, if it was a good or excellent story, then they are doomed to fame, which will prevent any further investigative reports.
The problem is that fame breeds the inability to gather information quietly, and sources confidential, both of which are needed for good investigations.
But there is even bigger problem with investigative journalism in general. This problem is called MONEY. It takes a great deal of money to do a good investigation. Combine this with the previously mentioned problem and you can see the real problem. Unknown investigative journalists get no momey to investigate anything. So they have to practically starve while running the investigation.
Then you have the cases like that of Dan Rather who do investigative pieces, who don't investigate any of the sources and defend the conclusions of the piece even when the evidence is shown to be fabricated. We call this "Liberal Bias" most of the time, unless Fox News is involved, then we call it Faux News.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The unfortunate downside to that is, local news is usually boring. In traveling around the US and Canada, watching the local news is amazingly boring. The "best" parts are frequently the fluff pieces.
"Local firefighters saved 56 kitties from trees this month"
"Martha's Pancake house goes for world record flapjack"
With some luck, something exciting will have happened, and they always stretch it out. On broadcast news, they announce it at the beginning, repeat the fact that it's coming up throughout the broadcast, and finally do the 30 second spot just before the end.
For quite a few years now, local news that would be remotely interesting has made national news (via wire services, of course), so even when I've gone to a new city, I was already caught up. Sometimes I will have read it first online, so by the time it makes print or radio, it's already old news.
I have a story up in my office, clipped out of a local tabliod.
It's this photo (from AP, of course). At least our local headline was better than average. "Can't help but notice the cig still in his mouth" :) The text on my print copy is the same as on the story with the link.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
At least at the national level. See http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ for an example - it started off as a single blogger who actually dug for news. Now it's up to about a dozen people, and they do a really good job of reporting.
The problem, in my view, is LOCAL news. There's no one who's really filling the role of the local paper in holding the local politicos accountable. It used to be that the county board had to tread at least a little bit lightly when cutting crooked deals with real estate developers, for example... because they couldn't discount the possibility that the County Post was checking up on what was going on. But now the County Post only publishes online, and only AP stories and blogs. There's really very little local reporting going on any more.
So you're saying we need a site like Gizmodo to report on the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, or to analyse Australian foreign policy from the perspective of the EU member nations?
Gizmodo and Engadget cover relatively trivial consumer products. That's not what the Associated Press does, kid. Get a clue.