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

[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

[timeOday]

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.

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.

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

[Locklin]

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?

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

[Eldragon]

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.

Easy steps

[Thanshin]

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.

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."

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.

Link to the original article

[Bearhouse]

[censored]

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?

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.

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.

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.