AP Proposes ASCAP-Like Fees For the News

eldavojohn writes "Techdirt directed my attention to an article where the AP discussed pressure from new devices and mediums today giving them cause to create a clearinghouse for news — much like the music industry's ASCAP — to 'establish an enforcement and payment system.' You'll notice that the story I am linking to and quoting is an AP story ... would Slashdot then be required to pay these fees? We have seen DMCA take down notices and fee discussions before from the AP."

Comments

And so the AP pulls the trigger...

[roc97007]

...with the gun in their own mouth. If this goes through, it'll be the last nail in the coffin of classic news.

Re:And so the AP pulls the trigger...

[DrgnDancer]

I keep hearing this, but what do you plan on replacing traditional news with? You may not have noticed, but all the bloggers and sites like Slashdot or Reddit? They're all aggregators. They don't investigate news in any traditional sense. They troll around newspaper and news sites and read stuff. If they're a full on aggregator like /. then they just post links to the stuff they read (or that people submitted to them). If they're a blogger then they write an opinion piece and share the info out. When a liberal or conservative blogger "breaks a story" it just means that they read it in some local newspaper. They were the first nationally read source to break the story, but mostly they didn't actually create it. With a very, very small number of exceptions (usually where some source calls a blogger and gives them info), these guys don't produce news. They consume it and regurgitate it at you (Which sounds really gross, I didn't necessarily mean that in a bad way).

If traditional news sources disappear, there will be no revolution where "new media" wanks will take over and do thing better and more accurately. They will have nothing to comment on. There will be no news for them to "break". Real investigative news requires a staff and a budget. You can't fly to Afghanistan to report on the ongoing war effort using the money you got from Google ad-sense this month. You can't run a month long investigate effort into discovering that the local government is embezzling the city retirement fund when you have to produce a new blog entry twice a day to pay the bandwidth bill.

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[account_deleted]

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Flawed logic

[multisync]

You'll notice that the story I am linking to and quoting is an AP story ... would Slashdot then be required to pay these fees?

ASCAP exists to collect royalties for creative works. "News" articles are a collection of facts (at least that's what they are supposed to be), and those facts are not copyrightable. This is the reason in the old days news papers busted their asses trying to "scoop" on another. They knew once the information was out there, it was fair game for anyone to report on it.

Opinion columns, features, photos etc are a different matter. But simply reporting the fact that AP has cooked up a hair-brained scheme to try to extract money out of Google - and linking to your source for that "fact" - wouldn't require a royalty payment in any sane copyright law.