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Inside the AP's Plan To Security-Wrap Its News Content
suraj.sun writes with an excerpt from this story at Ars Technica that the "Associated Press, reeling from the newspaper apocalypse, has a new plan to 'wrap' and 'protect' its content though a 'digital permissions framework.' The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to 'apply protective format to news.' The AP's news registry will 'tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,' and it will provide a 'platform for protect, point, and pay.' That's a lot of 'p'-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news — 'enforcement,' in AP-speak."
If it were, then whoever moderated this post would have read the Ars Technica story. The "wrapper" and DRM are nothing but an HTML microformat, which enables categorizing and parsing, but has zilch to do with enforcement.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Associated Press
The Associated Press Board of Directors today directed The Associated Press to create a news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use. The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used.
"What we are building here is a way for good journalism to survive and thrive," said Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Directors and vice chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group Inc. "The AP news registry will allow our industry to protect its content online, and will assure that we can continue to provide original, independent and authoritative journalism at a time when the world needs it more than ever."
The registry will initially cover all AP text content online, and be extended to AP member content in early 2010. Eventually, it will be expanded to cover photos and video as well. AP will fund development and operation of the registry through 2010, until it becomes self-sustaining.
The board announced in April, at its annual meeting, that the Cooperative would launch an industry initiative to protect news content from unauthorized use online. At its meeting today, at AP headquarters, the board voted to approve creation of a news registry that will serve as the foundation of that initiative.
The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content. The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational âoewrapperâ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.
The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content, by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.
In other action, the AP Board also voted to approve rate assessment reductions for broadcast members of the Cooperative. Under the plan, AP will reduce local TV members' basic text assessments by 10 percent in 2010. The amount of rate reduction per station varies depending on the level of services received. At its annual meeting in April, The Associated Press announced assessment reductions for member newspapers, the second year rates were reduced. AP member radio rates were adjusted several years ago to include added discounts, day-part service options and barter pricing.
About The AP
The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the worldâ(TM)s population sees news from AP.
to being real journalists? are they just trying to protect the nonsense half-ass poorly written claptrap they currently pawn off as news?
I rather like this alternate interpretation of the infographic the AP used to explain their new scheme. Found via BoingBoing.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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Was the sound of them becoming irrelevant and being left behind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just in case anyone's not interested, that post contains '18' single quotes, possibly a new record. I keep envisioning an imaginary hand lifting to do the quotes gesture everytime I see one of those, and TFP disturbed me quite a lot. I feel that a lot of it could have been said without the excessive single quotes around every other word, especially when it came to p-prefaced, which could have been written as-is. Thank you.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
>> In what way does this scheme "wrap" and "protect" the news? It doesn't; it simply marks it up, and adding tags expressing a content creator's wishes on reuse has no bearing on someone's rights under US copyright law.
Misleading summary
No, Bridis replied. "What I'm talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don't even comment on it. And it happens way more than most people realize."
If that happens way more than people realize, then people are unaware of these sites. If people are unaware of these sites, then they don't visit them, in which case they cannot be competition to the AP.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Sorry AP,
In an age when everyone carries an internet-enabled phone with a camera, you just aren't needed.
We're not sure who your replacement will be. But it won't be you.
It sure as hell won't be everyone and their internet-enabled phone.
Ugh. You just made paying for news much more appealing.
When will money-hungry people get a clue and realise more protection wont save your content from being copied. You dont lose money if your content is copied, as most people will still pay if they feel its worth the price for they want original quality content. Its not like we're stealing a car, because the content is still yours. You cant complain about losing viewers either, as if your content was good enough in the first place, people would stay with you, and your extra protection schemes just make a lot of people go to other sources for equivalent free content.
Information is meant to be free, if you think money is incentive for creating it, then what about the entire open source community and millions of free webpages? Why do these companies need big marketing and protection to get their content through, cant they let the product speak on its own?
The more control you try to get, and the less you end up with. I bet this new security wrapper will be hacked in minutes.
Do you D?
That's a lot of 'p'-prefaced jargon
I can only imagine how it went at AP HQ:
AP CEO: Now, before we adjourn, gentlemen, I have one last matter of utmost importance. I need to protect this precious piece of news from the perils of the interwebs or else our business model from the past will fail - anyone who wants it absolutely, positively _has_ to properly pay per line for it!
Yea right after we get the paperless office.
Hey I am all for blogging and the idea of the citizen reporter but they supplement not replace professionals.
Of course at least on TV I don't think the professionals are what they used to be but then I might just being an old fuddy duddy and seeing the past in rose colored glasses.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
..so you mean that we should all start crusing YouTube for our news content?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
...I find this move interesting and sad.
AP's wire stories used to be delivered using arcane satellite-to-modem-to-serial solutions that functioned pretty faithfully unless you got snow/ice on your satellite dish on the roof.
Then the AP switched to a web-based delivery method which was a hardware improvement, but a Sarbanes-Oxley nightmare along with website/Internet outage issues and other new hijinks that were all new issues that made this web-based solution worse than the arcane solution it replaced.
Now they've gone further down the dark path with DRM.... just sounds like more fun for newspaper IT guys.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
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I recall the early days of development, sales and distribution for PC software. A bunch of different anti-piracy methods were pursued, we all heard about the enormous amounts of money being lost to piracy, etc. In the end all these approaches really did was piss off the legitimate users and make the software less attractive. It's not exactly clear to me if the software industry really has any effective DRM system now, although they seem to have some things that look they are trying to protect themselves. I suspect the media industry will go through a similar evolution ... kicking, screaming and whining all the way.
So, if you can't be bothered to RTFA, the AP obviously has no idea what they're talking about. Some snake oil salesman came along and told them that Microformats are magic digital beans that will protect their content with some sort of "tracking beacon" that will phone home and prevent infringement.
This is so cluelessly ridiculous that I can't decide if it's hilarious or just sad.
Ugh, please do not clump print journalists with tv "news" personalities, where half their job is applying makeup.
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If it's even worth linking too, people can just convert the stories to images. Let the workaround games begin!
I'll be pasting this wire service shit into my so-called "journal entries", as per usual. I can always automate OCR off of the screen. So what if hyperlinks aren't preserved? Context and reference can be established by the 1 or 2 blokes who are already actually verifying that stuff.
I'm sure that this won't stop Wired News, Cryptogon.com, Cannon Fire or any of the guys like whatreallyhappened.com - who dump a bit of everything undercovered into the mix. But it will slow them - a bit.
Instead of this crappy pseudo-technology, which has been shown to be ineffective in every other application, AP could profitably syndicate with Google, and share ad revenues. AP==content Google==delivery+revenue engine.
Instead, they want to kill the bloggers - not because of business models. Because they no longer gatekeep the message or manage how it is spun.
Great oligarchs own the megaconglomerates behind corporate news. That's not wild-eyed tinfoil hatted craziness, but simple facts from earnings reports. With incipient dictatorship in everywhere from Western Europe, the US, Iran and Israel, and a coming fiscal "crisis" designed to unify world reserve currency, there's a greater need than ever for these "overlords" - and the banks that loaned them their capital - to turn the Weird Wild Web into your 1984 telescreen.
So, they'll try. Soon, it won't be worth switching on the router - cause you'll be tracked like a migratory bird. In the meantime, we'll all still link and scrape. We'll still point out EXACTLY what they are up to.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I was thinking of Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner both of which I feel where true journalists.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You make the assumption that there are any professionals to replace.
Let's just get together and buy AP and fund them, and as their new owners, let the news be free. Like for example BBC is financed, but with all rich countries peoples that have an interest in journalists running around the world finding stuff out and reporting on it.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Republicans are farmers, miners and oil drillers and then small business owners at the core. There are plenty of rank and file Republicans who would just as soon let IP laws fall by the wayside because liberals are so concentrated in businesses that benefit from copyright laws.
This is my sig.
I guess Wikinews is about to get a lot more popular. Maybe it could be an eventual replacement for AP?
Will it be everyone everywhere reporting everything they see all the time? That would give an interesting bent to coverage.
Great way to disapear AP. I, for one, Im glad that youve taken this step towards the future where we, the digicrowd, control de shebang.
NO SIG
I know it sounds nuts, but I actually want a system like this for personally identifiable information (PII).
If a business has my PII in their records, I want them to tag it with meta-data on how it was collected and what rights *they* have to use/share it. It's not any more enforceable than any other DRM scheme, but it would help to implement privacy policies, which is good for the consumer. And it would help to limit secondary uses of PII which is also good for the businesses that make money by collecting PII.
I'm wanting meta-data with terms like "this was collected with NO permission to re-distribute", or "this was collected with a promise to delete after 6 months", etc.
Now we'll only be able to read the news through a DRM-114 Confabulator.
Professionals? Clearly you've not paid attention to the news industry. Yellow Journalism is a requirement now.
It's going to be at least as annoying as scribd, isn't it? Some sort of annoying flash thing that keeps people from copying text? Maybe the efforts of those captcha hackers can be redirected.
Breaking a story and reporting are not the same thing. Obviously, the vast majority of news stories are "broken" by eyewitnesses who are rarely journalists. That's not reporting.
If content providers get the ability to enforce moronic schemes like this one, many people may find themselves in the receiving end of lawsuits--even some who just followed older fair-use provisions.
AP has asked the Government to examine Google News and other content aggregators, claiming they contribute insufficiently to their income.
"The newspapers put their content up on the web for free and then Google, the freeloading bastards, tell people where to find it. We told them to pay up or stop using our stuff, and they said OK, they'd stop using our stuff! We need the Government to bring back balance, 'balance' defined as being able to make them give us money because we want it. You'd think the Internet wasn't invented to give news publishers and record companies free money!"
The AP argues that traffic from search engines does not make up the cost of producing the content. "Ad revenue has collapsed, so search engine traffic doesn't bring in enough views to pay for itself. Our inability to sell ads is clearly Google's problem."
The AP suggests the exploration of new models that "require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site through DRM and lawsuits and 'at the edges' in the world of search and aggregation. Basically, they should just give us money because we want it. And the music industry too. How about a bailout? Go on, gi's it."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"this was collected with a promise to delete after 6 months"
We'll keep it for now and check back later... We'll keep it for now and check back later...
>>>That's not reporting.
Right. We need reporters to take the eyewitness newsgatherings, chop them into little bits so they can be distorted, and then explain why this event requires yet another layer of bureacracy added to our government.
If you don't know what I mean, watch Babylon 5's "The Illusion of Truth" where a reporter manages to take the stars of the show, and twist-around events to make them look like an out-of-control mob needing government to fix the mess.
Anyway.....
Megacorporate reporters, for whatever reason, are biased towards more-and-more government. The idea that we need LESS government is never proposed on the evening news. I say we take-away their power to present only this slanted viewpoint, and give reporting back to the common man via websites. At least that way we can hear both sides of the story.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Seriously, your own XML schema constitutes a solid DRM system? Reminds me of a clip from Family Guy:
Brian (at the Quahog county trailer park): You're really going to take back donated presents on Christmas Eve?
Peter: Yep, now here's the plan: You'll enter through the air contitioning duct here. Now there'll be an invisible laser grid three inches from the floor, so you'll have to compress your body to the size of an ordinary household sponge and slide underneath like some kind of weird amphibious dolphin.
Brian: Can I buy some pot from you?
Yea it pretty much sucks but it is still better than most of what you find on the Internet. The problem with the Internet is that most people will find some website that will reinforce their view of the world. They will then think that it is unbiased because for most people they assume anything they don't agree with is unbiased because they are very sure that they are fair and even handed.
Take a look at what gets posted in Slashdot for goodness sake.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"About The AP The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world ....
Written by AP no doubt. Someone should show this to their editors, AP has been carrying Republican water for years.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
protect, point, and pray...Might work. Reading screen shots really sucks
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
You're absolutely right, the same is that Journalism has gotten WAAAAY lazy. what passes for journalism these days is hardly better than amateur blogging. its rare to find real investigative in depth _unsensationalized_ journalism anymore. the closest you get on the radio is NPR and for as much as i like it, NPR can be pretty biased at times. on the TV you have Dateline going around Punking Pedophiles but thats largely sensationalized and then theres the Daily Show, which isnt so much journalism as exposing hypocrisy in the media and politics. its a damn shame. for the most part the stupp i see from the AP often trying to hard to be first its just flat wrong. Anecdotally, i have the APs iPhone app (i'm a news junkie) and as a "feature" it will text you any major breaking news. i got a message yesterday saying "Judge Sonya Sotomayer Confirmed as US First Hispanic Justice" yeah... either they employ prophets or are smokin peyote.
Holy crap, thats ingeious! its like a EULA for your own work! i want mine to say by reading this content the boss has consented to an anual 30% raise and a binding labor agreement requiring no more than 20 hours of work and permitting no more than 50. nobody reads the EULA.hell... it should also stipulate a week in vegas with the bosses daughter, just for good measure... assuming shes hot.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
This has zilch to do with enforcement because the proposal contains no technical method of enforcement.
Not technical, no. Their big enforcement plan is...lawyers!
See, the AP is convinced that its Public Enemy Number 1 is robot scrapers. You know them...cruddy sites that blindly copy the HTML from legitimate news sites and archive them, in the hopes that someday, when the stories have long since fallen off the CNN.com and nytimes.com headline pages, someone from a search engine will stumble across the story and click on an add, thereby generating revenue. Like the ones that copy Wikipedia articles and add advertisements.
The plan is to basically embed some sort of web bug in the HTML, which will help AP identify the scrapers, which will allow them to file an honest lawsuit, in which the infringing scraper will show up in court, hat in hand, and beg forgiveness.
This is sad for several reasons.
1. The AP believes that these scrapers are actually a serious threat to the AP's revenue stream.
2. The AP believes that the people who run these scrapers won't be able to strip their tracking bugs out
3. The AP believes that it'll be able to find and sue the operators and make them stop, instead of just driving them into jurisdictions that don't care.
4. The AP is confusing these scrapers with legitimate aggregators, like Google News, and legitimate bloggers, and thus making lots of enemies
I got skeptical with the anti-government rant and quit when you cited a fictional sci-fi television show for "evidence". Note in my original comment that I mentioned applying my own filter even to professionally gathered news.
All human communication is vulnerable to bias. As a mature adult, I recognize this and make the appropriate adjustments to my credulity. Professional news is, in a sense, the devil we know. We know it is biased towards the governmental and corporate status quo. That is an easy bias to correct for when reading the news.
Eyewitnesses about whom we know nothing WRT their agenda or credibility are hardly a more reliable source.
the functionality already exists
its called P3P from the w3c, it is specified in your headers on every request and specifies what the company who is setting the cookie does with your information
http://www.w3.org/P3P/
in IE8 > safety > web page privacy policy
Firefox supports P3P policies but its a convoluted setup and is well hidden from the user (why?)
http://mozilla.gunnars.net/firefox_help_firefox_cookie_tutorial.html#Advanced_Cookie_options
filter out AP articles more easily. I typically do a search using google news such as "site:wsj.com -AP" in order to filter out all the crap AP articles. I hope they succeed in restricting their "news" as that's just less filtering I have to do to read the real news.
BS
You've got to be kidding. Was that just a gut feeling? Have you ever heard a Republican say anything of the sort?
Maybe you should email members of your delegation and ask. I did, and I can assure you that Republicans from my state are wholly dedicated to "Protecting America's Intellectual Property and Competitiveness(tm)". The ranking member and former chair of the House committee charged with overseeing IP (the Judiciary Committee), Lamar Smith, is one of the strongest allies the IP cartels have ever known. Additionally, in his position he's protected the corrupt the Eastern District of Texas.
The IP debate is still far too esoteric for members of either party to be shamed into saying "no" to the cartels.
Oh, and this is interesting: do a whois for 143.231.249.141 and look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lamar_S._Smith&action=history. Self-editing from a House.gov network. Stay classy, Lamar.
By repeating their string of P-terms, they can spit in the face of their would-be readers.
Critical analysis, which would normally fall under "fair use"? P on that!
Add www.ap.org and hosted.ap.org to hosts file.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
It's called a canary trap. Post even a snippet to your favorite BBS or blog and you're busted.
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In real news the consumer's don't even care or notice. AP, having hidden their news, goes unnoticed.
Little bits? like tweets?
Caveat: I understand the summary is flat wrong, the AP isn't trying to DRM the news, but some points are still interesting and should be explored.
> Hey I am all for blogging and the idea of the citizen reporter but they supplement not replace professionals.
I would normally agree, if not for there being, of late, too many examples of the professionals not being, I dunno, very professional. Citizen reporters may not be an adequate replacement, but I understand the frustration that might lead one to make the experiment.
An interesting dynamic is one already active -- for every controversial story, there's a thousand geeks out there with sophisticated tools trying to prove it wrong, be it telling the difference between a bird and a missile, or checking the font of a document against typewriters available at the time. It's possible that mob vetting will compensate for mob reporting. That seems a bit too volatile to me, but hey, I'm not a social expert, even on TV.
But what's clear is that the massive physical brick-and-mortar infrastructure that is "the news" (in all it's forms) is rapidly becoming irrelevant, for several reasons, not the least of which is, we don't trust them anymore. But this doesn't necessarily mean there will no longer be professional reporters. It may mean that they work for a much smaller, more loosely defined organization.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
you have been leading and dominating all news since last 100 or so years. AND despite being the bearer of the news that heralded huge changes in the course of human history, now, you yourselves are naively, stupidly trying to withstand the change. we are living in a digital era. we are living in an era where citizen journalists report the news.
entrench yourself against this like this, put yourselves in the camp that opposes THE PEOPLE, and you will lose.
Read radical news here
http://craphound.com/images/apdiagramremix.jpeg
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The media is FULL of professionals you dolt!
(Professional stenographers that is. Actual reporters are considered unemployable and undesirable though.)
Are you serious? You actually consider any of that to be journalism? Even as a 10 year old working on my elementary school 'newspaper' we learned that the bare minimum for a story was how, who, what, when, where, and why. None of your so-called 'news' stories even come close on any one of those items. 'Theres a plane in the Hudson'. Great story - all I need to know about it. 'There's ice on Mars'. Wow - that really means a lot to me.
So what exactly is the problem with AP? Oh, wait, I know - they expect to get PAID for their work, the greedy bastards.
And why is that? It wouldn't have anything at all to do with the publics insistence on cheap and/or free, would it?
Apparently these folks aren't familiar with the concept of "Copy & Paste"... most end users have a far better grasp of C&P than what constitutes fair use in IP law.
Good luck with overcoming that, AP!
Technical solutions to human problems always work out so well.
That might be a valid point if this wasn't starting, at the very least, during the Clinton era which pre-dates most people's internet access. Secondly, the BBC is guilty of it too and they don't have to worry about income.
I personally think it comes down to trying to expand their markets and have news coverage 24 hours a day. The fact is there isn't enough news to pad out a whole day and keep people interested.
TV news is the worst but print media still needs to compete with TV so it can be just as bad.
AP don't do anything, their poor exploited workers do. Smash the €€vu£ corpra$hun'$!!!! Rise up! Rise up! You have nothing to lose but your paychecks!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>>>I got skeptical with the anti-government rant and quit when you cited a fictional sci-fi television show for "evidence".
First-off I didn't cite it as evidence. I never used that word, despite you falsely-quoting it. Second, are you saying a lesson can never be learned from fiction? "A Modest Proposal" about serving children as food, never had any impact on society, or led to welfare programs for the children? AMP may have been fiction but it did make people stop-and-think.
All I was doing was expressing an opinion that reporters are pro-big government biased, and that you really can't believe what you see on the TV, because it's so easily distorted. I then cited "Illusion of Truth" not as evidence, but as a demonstration of how easy it is to chop-up what people say, rearrange those quotes, and turn them into a negative outcome. That was why the author wrote that episode - to make people stop and think.
If you prefer a real-world example, just watch "Bowling for Columbine" where the producer rather creatively takes 3 different Charles Heston speeches, rearranges them, and merges them together as one speech. What gives it away is the color of Heston's tie which changes from red to black to red in a mere two minutes time.
This producer won an award for his outstanding "reporting" but I call it biased, slanted, distorted. The evening news is no better, with their distortion of the truth (an illusion of truth), never once suggesting a less government solution, and instead always recommending more-and-more government. Clear bias.
At least with internet-based news reporting, instead of just hearing the one-sided view of the national megacorps, we'd get to hear a wide variety of views which is healthier for society.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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But the real question is whether they will learn spelling and grammar.
In the example of the Hudson river landing, many thousands of people witnessed that event as it occurred, because their offices and apartments faced the river, including the NYT for example. Me, I heard the plane and ran to the window, in time to see it splashdown, but not enough time for my smartphone camera to be ready to take the pic.
Owning a cellphone doesn't mean having a newsmaker reputation. At the next major event, it'll be another random citizen who was prepared to capture pics/video. That will consume some of his 15 minutes, and then the wheel moves on. There is no organizing principle for randomly-selected journalists.
It took the NYT over 150 years to evolve to their current state. If you're like most nerds here, you like their news, but you don't want to pay them for it. When they're gone, how will citizen journalism organize to fill that gap? They will need to organize into newsrooms, either physical or virtual/online.
Organized newswriting has been around so long that you won't even recognize that it was there until it's gone.
Twitter as a distribution mechanism is pretty effective, but Twitter doesn't filter, edit, rewrite, research etc. the stories... it's a vast echo chamber, 0.001% real info, 99.999% RT.
The AP of today is a collective composed of member news orgs. AP has a newsroom staff, plus the member orgs contribute writing. Everyone from Fox News to NYT takes AP stories. The real question is, what will become of "news" when there are no more newsrooms?
But I suspect the geek disdain for paying for news will change. It will take one under-reported scandal story near and dear to geeks' hearts.