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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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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!
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.
...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.
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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
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.
First people bitched about newspapers becoming redundant because it's all 'recycled stuff from the AP'. Well, what happens when the AP is gone? I guess we'll be left with talking heads regurgitating the news.
AP is a news gathering service. Sometimes they swindle regular Joe for a free photo/ video/ article, but most AP submitters are freelancers working to gather news full-time. As a former news-gatherer (didn't make enough money to cover my business insurance) - I'll gather stuff for free once my bills and housing become free too. If I had a cushy CS job during the day and did news-gathering at night, yea, I'd give AP my stuff for free.
Hell, even getting a copy of court transcripts require a small fee; a FOIA request, etc. Information shouldn't be censored, but I don't think charging $0.75 cents is unreasonably prohibitive that it could be considered 'elitist' or censorship.
Information, in my opinion, has always been out there for "free," but the problem you see, who wants to take their time to get them? Who wants to spend the hours between 9:30a-5:30p every Tue and Thur in city hall listening to council people debate? Journalists are there to distill information, and with the help of the editor decide what's relevant to people. Unfortunately what people "demand" these days often overrule the editor - i.e. Michael Jackson's death 'conspiracy.'
I think in the end whatever the AP bigwigs decide, or what the netizen thinks what should be "free," the people in the frontlines gathering news will still be fucked.
AP hasn't been a "professional news gathering service" for a long time. They turned into a bunch of biased 'editorialists' decades ago.
And now they want to restrict access to their drivel? Cya..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Perhaps they're paranoid that the profits of the past will be plundered by pilferous and plagiarizing pirates.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Now we'll only be able to read the news through a DRM-114 Confabulator.
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.
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 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
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.
>>>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