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AP Will Sell You a "License" To Words It Doesn't Own
James Grimmelmann performed an experiment using the AP's form to request a license to use more than four consecutive words from one of their articles. Except that he didn't paste in words from the (randomly chosen) article, but instead used 26 words written by Thomas Jefferson 196 years ago: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea. The AP cheerfully charged him $12 to use Jefferson's 26 words. Both Boing Boing and TechDirt have picked up the story so far. Grimmelmann adds an update to his blog: the AP has rescinded his license to Jefferson's words and issued a refund for his $12. They did not exhibit the grace to admit that their software is brain-dead.
He *offered* to pay them for words they don't own and they accepted his money since the mechanism for doing so does not check ownership. It's simply a word count. AP did not seek him out to collect charges. That is a big difference. In fact, that difference to me is why it's a non-story. Basically the AP is charging on a "per word" basis. So all they need to do count words. That someone decided to pay the AP for a worthless license and the AP decided to issue a worthless license doesn't mean anything. No laws were broken. No trust broken. No rights violated. The person did this with intent to gain a worthless license even. He got what he paid for.
You can, however, relicense something that's in the public domain. You're not even obliged to tell them it's public domain.
However, you cannot claim that the recipient of such license is not legally allowed to do certain things, when it is clearly false (because of the public domain nature of the source). In this case, upon handing out the "license", AP claimed:
The entire excerpt must be used exactly as written and the copyright attribution footer and link below must be included within the document in which the excerpt is published.
And the footer is:
(c) 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if the work is in public domain, you cannot claim copyright to it (you could claim copyright to a derived work, but not the original work verbatim). If so, what AP has done may well be illegal.