AP Harasses Own Member Over AP Youtube Videos

DrEldarion writes "The Associated Press, who has been acting very bipolar lately about Google News (they get paid by Google for their content, and then complain about Google 'stealing' that content), has another issue with not knowing what their association is up to: they set up a channel on Youtube, and then threatened an AP affiliate for embedding that content."

Comments

Car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

You pay a parking license to go to someone's garage, and then get towed for parking in someone's garage!

Re:Car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine that you were trying to load a station wagon full of magnetic tapes into the library of congress. And a football field full of Volkswagon Beatles filled with hard disks races around you and charges you money for the privilege. Meanwhile, the hogshead of petrol that you bought a fortnight ago is running out while you wait.

Signing its own death warrant

[rolfwind]

None of these tactics will get people to buy more newspapers. I don't know what will, but I sure don't want Google to set a precedent for linking to asshats who can't be bothered to spend 3 minutes to edit their robots.txt if they hate it so much. But of course they won't do that. They don't want a solution, they just want money.

The problem is, as with organizations like the RIAA, once you pay them off, you just fund their lawyers to go after others who want to make use of fairuse. This is as big threat to a free internet as any national firewall or net neutrality.

Re:Signing its own death warrant

[the_arrow]

The problem is that AP doesn't want to stop Google from indexing them, they just want to be paid more.

No future..

[aurispector]

I just can't see a future in these organizations suing the pants off of anyone and everyone in sight. It doesn't appear to do anyone any good, not even the rights-holders benefit in the end since they just turn themselves into litigation businesses. If this isn't a reason for far-reaching copyright reform, I don't know what is.

Nothing more exciting than Big Org gets confused

[khakipuce]

It's bound to happen, set up a department to check web content and they will find your own content apparently copied. Tracing that back through to some original poster and then identifying that poster as legitimate or not is going to be difficult.

Anyone who has worked in a medium to large organisation will know how hard it is to find out what someone in the same building is doing, let alone some affiliate.

Re:Nothing more exciting than Big Org gets confuse

[Sockatume]

Tracing that back through to some original poster and then identifying that poster as legitimate or not is going to be difficult

You'd think that somewhere near the top of the list of "authorised users" would be "Our Own Goddamn YouTube channel". That part shouldn't have been difficult. That the group checking for infringement weren't aware of the legit YouTube channel, and didn't comprehend what embedding it meant, suggests that the group looking for infringements is on more of a "shoot first, don't ask questions" approach. We take it for granted that fair use is dead, but having a department seemingly set up to block all use is beyond a joke.

Ominous

[agorist_apostle]

It worries me when the free flow of political and economic information is going to start becoming the newest IP/DRM battleground because people who produce information simply cannot wrap their minds around the idea that information is now cheaply and easily reproducible and their old business models are defunct. All sorts of de facto censorship could very easily occur now under the guide of "protecting their business," especially given the tight mingling of media companies, the government, banks, etc.