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AP and 28 News Groups To Collect Fees From Aggregators
jjp9999 writes "The Associated Press is launching the NewsRight project to make aggregators pay for content. Some of the top names in the news industry are currently on board, including New York Times Co. and Washington Post Co, and they're currently negotiating with Gannett, Tribune, Cox and News Corp. The project will license original news from the media companies and collect royalties from aggregators. The use of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits are already on the agenda. NewsRight's first salesperson starts work this week."
similar to what already happened in Belgium with a newspaper: Belgian Appeals Court Says Google Must Pay Up For Linking To Newspaper Websites
a few months later: Belgian Newspapers 'Give Permission' To Google To Return Them To Search Results
Don't forget this bit:
They worked with Cisco/Linksys for five years prior to the suit. Cisco had ample time and help to comply with the GPL before the FSF filed suit. They then settled when Cisco finally decided to step up and be compliant, I don't believe the FSF sought damages or financial compensation.
So again, how are these similar?
Yes, it is, but the "traditional media" pay AP for that privilege and the argument is that so should the "new media" that publish these articles.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
It's covered by the RICO act (and other laws), and is known as extortion. It's basically summarized as, "I threaten to take legal action against you, if you don't pay me money."
They know perfectly well that Mr. Blogger, who may make hundreds a year, can't possibly defend himself against a single corporation who makes millions, or a group of corporations who make billions.
It's not even just the individual. They could take down Slashdot, as portions of the article are reused here. That *is* allowed by copyright law as fair use.
What these publishers are going to find out is, if they kill off the bloggers who are partially republishing their stories and providing links, the traffic to the original publication is going to drop. I won't say it would be huge. That all depends on the publication. How many people read the NY Times directly, and how many catch an interesting story on Slashdot and follow the link to the NY Times?
I strongly suspect that the average Mr. Blogger is not the target. They want the big fish with big money. Google News, Yahoo News, and other multi-million hit/day sites. I don't know, but I suspect, that they are already paying their tribute to the news corps for at least some of their feeds. This will severely impact mid-level news sites, who get tens of thousands of hits/day. They may make a few bucks at it from advertising, but that's a long way from being able to pay for feeds from AP, Reuters, UPI, etc. More often than not, the advertising revenue barely pays for their hosting.
As it's clear that they are litigious bastards, they will work their way down the ranks, until they're filing 100k "John Doe" lawsuits every week. It could very easily get to the point where if you posted more than a few words that could have been in another story, you owe or get shut down.
But, the litigious bastards will always win. Why? Because they have the money. They already own a decent portion of our political system, they can and will have laws changed in their favor. This has been proven time and time again. At very least, the litigious bastards can afford to keep it in court longer than you can.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
SOPA is about the takedown of servers that house illegal content.. and the overreach is that they'll take out a whole service to punish for one piece of offending content. This is about the AP stepping up and selling a bundle of content suppliers for one price, essentially making a legal store so there's a right way to do it.
I never said that only US citizens had rights, but rather that it is most shocking that someone would kill their own citizens. I believe that the bill of rights expressed in the US Constitution are some of the most basic human rights that everyone has and that they are absolute.
Every leader kills citizens of different countries in war (I'm not justifying war, or the killing of anyone, but rather stating a fact), it is only dictators who kill their own citizens under the pretense of "war". And my post was drawing attention to this point, not saying that non US citizens had no rights.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The way it works is (very roughly): 1) news agencies have people on the ground taking pictures and writing the facts. 2) The news agencies sell the facts to newspapers and TV. 3) The aggregators republish the news from the online versions of newspapers.
Cut out 3), and 1) + 2) is the same as it's always been, even before the internet existed. Even if you cut out 2), say if Murdoch goes belly up, then 1) can still sell the facts to 3), which is what TFA is about.
He's talking about when the person that is threatened with a lawsuit was never doing anything illegal in the first place, but rather is just being pushed around by a company because they don't have the resources to go to court. If they did have the resources, they would be found innocent.