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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 Grimmelmann adds an update to his blog: the AP has rescinded his license to Jefferson's words and issued a refund for his $12. They did not exhibit the grace to admit that their software is brain-dead.
And so we see yet another terminally-ill industry smothering itself with a pillow.
Should be changed to "$.46-a-word" press.
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
I'm afraid Mr. Grimmelman has a severe English comprehension deficiency. The instructions are a single sentence, clear as day. It says paste the article text you want to use. Not " paste whatever you like, and if our javascript form counts the words for you then consider it assertion of copyright by us.".
I've known folks whose workplaces used to pay Sun a license fee for Perl ... the same Perl you could download for free (as in beer); and yes, the same Perl that is one of the usual examples of successful free (as in speech) software.
No, they didn't get tech support. They didn't get to file bugs against Perl that would be resolved by a Sun engineer. They didn't even get a custom build of Perl optimized for their Sun hardware. They didn't even get a CD. What they got was an invoice ... precisely what their company's IT procurement process required.
It's idiotic, but there is in fact a market for nothing: if you are correctly positioned as a trusted supplier, there are cases when you can get paid for delivering no product at all, but merely for carrying out the ritual of delivering a product, with all the paperwork thereunto appertaining.
The Associated Press collects articles from reporters all over the world. I doubt those reporters submit articles royalty-free. How does the AP tie licensed text back to the article it applies to? Clearly they don't bother.
considering AP is a company that doesn't allow anything resembling fair use is it really surprising tht they would show the kind of laziness demonstrated here? Assuming some court doesn't strike this nonsense down as a violation of fair use rights, the system is completely broken and should be either reformed greatly or abolished.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Maybe they just think that no one has used those words in that particular order before.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The moral of the story is don't let content owners tell you what is acceptable fair use, because OF COURSE they will always err on it being not fair use. I think that for anyone who legitimately wants to follow the law and legitimately use a large portion of text, having a tool like this is pretty great. It's better than the alternatives of having to hassle with trying to find someone w/in the AP that can license to you or just illegally copying the text outright.
but again, if you know you are w/in fair use, then use it, or ask an expert, don't ask the content owner.
Good point. And they did refund the money. I guess the flaw is assuming that the user wants to play by the rules, and I suppose we'd be complaining even at the unnecessary restrictions to account for the users who do not. We can make any machine look stupid when we misuse it.
The beef here I think is that they have the 'audacity' to sell the license... but now that I think about it, it's still a much better system than trying to contact a real person and deal with it. Still, I don't think it should be too hard to have a JavaScript check to see if the words come from the actual article. At the very least that might help prevent people from accidentally misquoting it if they are silly and type by hand or copy the wrong article or whatever.
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
I'm writing a computer program that will figure out every word combination that can possibly be used to form a sentence, and then copyrighting the output. When someone writes something somewhere, I'll sue them for copyright infringement.
Don't even think about stealing this idea. I have it patent pending on it!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
At least using "free as in beer" stays free as in beer.
My webcomic
All this tool does is count the number of words in a block of text. Every word processor and text editor I can think of has this feature already built in. And the premise that the copyright owner should be able to charge on a per-word basis (especially in text made up largely of quotations from other sources, as most AP articles are) is truly preposterous.
But I think his point was to ridicule the ridiculous assumption from AP that they should be able to restrict access to and license on a per-word basis any text "more than four consecutive words" in the first place. The Jefferson quote helps him make the point. The fact that the software is basically just a word counter adds a level of lol, but I don't think that was the main point of this experiment.
What if the AP sells you a license for text copyrighted by Reuters or any of the other wire services? Woah, man!
We can make any machine look stupid when we misuse it.
Rule #1: Never trust user input.
Still, I don't think it should be too hard to have a JavaScript check to see if the words come from the actual article.
LOL @ Javascript
They need a database of every AP article ever published.
Then they can either hash the pasted text & try to find
the source or they can require you to provide a citation.
Either way, you don't want to do that client-side with javascript.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's idiotic, but there is in fact a market for nothing: if you are correctly positioned as a trusted supplier
Finally! An explanation for the RIAA/MPAA and other association's sense of entitlement that we can all understand!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why would you put words they don't own into their licensing software? Is it malice or stupidity on your part?
Why bother
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.
I see nothing wrong with what AP did here. This is like complaining that Comcast will let you pay your cable bill even if you don't watch any TV. Yeah, they will. So?
Why the heck is this modded troll? 'troll' != 'i disagree with this person'.
The parent raises a valid point. If you are stupid enough to offer me money for a copy of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, Thomas Jefferson's or William Shakespeare's writings or anything else in the public domain, why shouldn't I accept your money? The AP's software may be brain dead but to say that this represents an industry "smothering itself with a pillow" rather misses the point.
I would also add that of those cheering the downfall of the AP aren't likely to be too happy with the eventual consequences. The blogosphere may do a fair job of covering Washington (although most of it so slanted to one side or another as to make Fox News look fair and balanced) but the coverage of local issues and politics is sadly lacking.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Why would the AP charge for words it doesn't own? Is it malice or incompetence on their part?
Well, why would anyone request a license from AP for words that AP doesn't own? Is Grimmelmann too incompetent to figure out why the whole premise of his exercise is inane, or is he maliciously trying to portray AP as greedy when their only "sin" here is not making their systems impervious to idiots who would throw their money away?
What if Jefferson's quote had been used in the article?
I think that was the whole point to the exercise...missed by some above. The content provider trying to extort people into paying license fees they may not need. This exercise demonstrates that the content provider in question can't positively identify their own material or material that they can't legitimately claim as intellectual property. They can't conclusively back up the need for anyone to license a particular piece. They're ignoring the context, intended use and trying to rewrite fair use by their own definition.
This exercise exposes that it's a scam, an online shake down. I think it actually works against their IP claims.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How does the AP tie licensed text back to the article it applies to?
They do it by not paying royalties -- they do it by buying a license to distribute the article to others.
Let's say that you're, oh, a novelist with a 100,000 word novel, and a choice of how to get your payment. You can get paid 10% off the top for every one of your $10 books sold, OR you can get a $.10 a word for the right for the publisher to print your novel, and keep all the profit (or risk) to themselves.
If you're Stephen King, and can expect to easily sell way over 10,000 copies, you insist on the first deal. But if you're, oh, a nameless nobody, the $10k looks pretty good. Especially if you're already on to your next project, and need to feed your kids. And if you're a publisher that sells a LOT of almost randomly selected books, the latter looks good to you too--because you pay a fair amount of money to a lot of authors, and so get that lot of books you depend on.
To demonstrate how stupid it is. The whole point of the tool is to tell you how much (if any) you have to pay them - if you already know that, what's the point of the tool?
Consider, supposing I want to licence an article, and within that article is a large chunk of text that's quoted from Jefferson or whoever. This suggests that it would happily include those words in the cost calculation. I guess it's their right to charge whatever arbitrary value they like for a whole article, but this is all the more reason for stories like this to be publicised, so that people are aware of how the tool works. Plus, what if someone did want to quote a Jefferson quotation that happened to be in an article? The point is that they'll happily claim ownership, so it's important for people to be aware of how brain dead and simple the tool is.
Actually, I think virtually all book publishers only give money up front as an "advance against royalties." Often the figure is based on an estimate of how many copies will actually sell. If you write a computer book, for example, you'll probably never see much in the way of royalties beyond the original advance, because the publisher will be able to predict the market for your book and compensate you appropriately. I've heard of few instances where modern book publishers pay by the word. Magazine publishers, on the other hand, often do -- but then, the lengths of magazine articles are usually dictated by the magazine's editors.
Breakfast served all day!
That's true. Jefferson's 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson concerned itself with inventions and patents, which had been an area of special interest to Jefferson as he was 1) an inventor; 2) Secretary of State during a period where he had responsibility for reviewing patent applications and issuing patents; 3) opposed to monopolies as a general rule.
However, it is widely recognized that Jefferson's argument, which is made at a very high level, is perfectly applicable to copyrights. After all, copyrights and patents are more closely related to one another than to, say, trademarks, or anything else, and at that high of a level, the underlying logic is basically the same.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
No, it's not.
It's like Comcast charging you for another provider's cable.
No, and I think most denizens of Slashdot would understand this: it's like Comcast (or the AP) having a bug in their software. Is the lesson here that organizations should have clauses in their contracts that their programmers are liable for any and all injuries to the organization's reputation caused by bugs in their software? Frankly, I should hope not. But that sure is the way we're pushing.
I spoke with my wife (who is an attorney) about this, and I may have been a bit hasty.
(1) It wasn't inappropriate for this guy to try this experiment, although the way he announced the result may have been a bit jerky.
(2) If the AP's web site is going to be "dumb" like this, they need a very prominent disclaimer that explains how dumb it is.
(3) If, in light of this discovery, the AP does not post an appropriate disclaimer, then they are clearly in the wrong, because then they would be KNOWINGLY selling licenses to content that they don't (necessarily) own.
Is it 5 words in a row or do I get charged for any 5 words I pull from the article? If so I would like to grab words "a, the, it, the, and" so I don't end up having to pay someone else even more.
What I find amazing is that people will pay for bottled water, even though a lot of it comes from the water tap. A couple of years ago Consumer Digest tested bottled water from different companies, and some of it was worse than city water. I buy filtered water but I'd rather have a filter attached to my faucet.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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.
What if the guy had used a paragraph from Dr. Phil's latest book?
The AP accepted money and offered a license for a copyright they do not own.
That is a contract and is arguably fraud.
It's not as simple as "asshat does something stupid".
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is just like when you get up an go to the zoo, and buy an ice cream cone with vanilla and strawberry ice cream, and you go into the penguin house and when you are in there a polar bear breaks out if its cage and you are trapped in the penguin house with you ice cream cone, and you notice that Natalie Portman is sitting next to to you covered in hot grits, and then, like, the polar bear breaks down the door and as he comes in...
Wait a second. Its NOTHING like that.
Its more like the AP hired some developer to write a tool license out its twenty three kajillion words of content automatically and told them they wanted it done by Tuesday. Do you really expect someone to write code that would contextually differentiate public IP content from private on the fly? Really?
While we are wishing for silly shit, I wish I was really the one in the penguin house in the story with my best grits spoon.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Actually, they do. In fact, they pay to submit those articles.
The reporters are paid by member newspapers, who submit their articles (if they're deemed noteworthy) for the AP to distribute. The AP can then do whatever the hell they want to with them. A good portion of the time some overworked schmuck at the AP office goes through and rips out all the local quotes, and locally relevant text (so as to make it more applicable across the country) and, having changed the story more than, say, 20%, they pull the original reporters byline off of it, thus producing a story that was written by Mr. Associated Press.
The newspapers and reporters don't care because their paper gets to use this article however THEY see fit, adding in their own local color and whatever, and then (if they've added enough) replacing the AP byline with their own byline and adding "from the ap", or "ap contributing", or whatever, to the bottom of the article.
The problem is that, now, everyone and their mother is reprinting this stuff without putting any money or original content back in the system. So they're pissed off, and charging the freeloaders a fee.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
Actually, no, it does apparently check ownership (or at least tries to). If you RTFA and see the screenshot therein, you'll see that the system added the following attribution footer to it:
Excerpted from AP Sources: Military-civilian terror prison eyed as published in Associated Press
and then there's another footer underneath that claims:
(c) 2009 Associated Press
And the thing goes on to claim that excerpt can only be used exactly as written, and with both footers intact.
The problem is that the system is bugged - the original article they quote doesn't even contain that excerpt. The problem is that they claim it does, and that you need their license to reproduce it. Yes, it's a dumb machine that does it, but whose bright idea was it to put a machine in charge of handing out legal documents - which is what those "licenses" presumably are - in the first place?
They just didn't make sure that they owned the rights before selling a license to someone who came to them to SPECIFICALLY buy a license from someone he damn well KNEW didn't own it. AP has done nothing wrong here.
Well, if their software made sure he already knew AP didn't own the quote, I agree. Please show me the mind-reading code and I'll shut up.
Otherwise, what could have happened is that someone by accident pays AP for a license to use something which AP doesn't own; or even worse, that AP issues an illegal license offer. As someone has already suggested, buy a license to RIAA lyrics from AP; go tell on AP to the RIAA; watch RIAA and AP duke it out in the two-men-enter-one-man-leaves arena.
What AP has done wrong (unless their code can read minds) is enable something very wrong.