Escalation
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AP sets up a toll booth for bloggers citing its stories
By Tim Conneally, BetaNews, June 17, 2008, 3:19 PM The AP’s disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the alternative (cough) it’s now offering to being served with takedown notices involves paying an up-front sum for excerpting online articles — as few as five words. [snip] On the heels of a blogosphere revolt last week because of its harsh actions against social news site The Drudge Retort, the AP regrouped over the weekend to take a less litigative — but more bureaucratic — approach to dealing with those who wish to quote its material. Where the group had previously invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and sent cease-and-desist orders to at least one blogger, seeking the removal of excerpted content (in some cases as few as 17 words in length), now the press service has attached an “Excerpt for Web Use” charge for passages as short as five words in length. [snip] |
There are a few pertinent questions asked in the excerpted portion of this online post regarding the application of the a$$pre$$‘ new pay us for each word of ours you quote system, especially regarding using quotes that may be taken from multiple sources (including the mental midgets at the AP) if they all use the same quotation (from the same press conference, for example) and/or quoting rewrites of AP blurbs (which seems to be relatively commonplace amongst those who get their primary news feeds from AP, then customize it for their local readership.
All I know is: here at the american street we’re not using any AP news feed data whatsoever. Now that these clowns are planning to charge for pointing to their news gathering, I’m relatively sure that there will be no plans to go back to utilizing their content. I would personally like to know what sort of fees we could charge them in the case that the Street provides actual news content that is not available from an AP source, but is utilized (cough) by the AP for its’ own purposes without similar payment from the AP for their fair use of the story.
Our Lady of the Concentration Camps has already gotten ahead of this curve and prepared an inital invoice statement to the AP for quoting her pile of Republican’t turds on the internets comments section* without paying for excerpting the original content contained therein. And a number of other bloggers are pointing out the logical inconsistencies involved in the AP not following the rules they propose others (but not the AP) use when quoting from another source, and tallying up the fees that AP would be paying to others - if they played by their own rules, that is…
If I were you, dear reader, I would look for an increasing amount of posts that kinda, sorta resemble something you might have read on the AP wire - if sarcastic, smart a$$ed bloggers got ahold of some of their content and enhanced it to the detriment of the AP.
* - funny how she thinks that AP should pay her (over $125K!) for some comments contributed to her blog, and the commenter who produced the unique content should get part of that cash (but not all of it); that’s Republican’ts for ya!
June 19th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Hey, that means Malkin owes me for quoting a comment i made on the John Edwards blog. Now I can afford that cup of coffee i’ve been saving up for.