No more quoting the AP newswire
The Associated Press has issued new licensing guidelines for quoting AP articles. The short version is that if you quote five or more words owned by the AP, you owe them royalties.
This apparently applies to 'fair use' such as copying articles to a co-worker in email. The AP also reserves the right to cancel your license at any time if they find your use of quotes "offensive" or "damaging" to their "reputation". No more quotes - I'm only one word away from a lawsuit. But a slightly braver soul can give you more details.
This apparently applies to 'fair use' such as copying articles to a co-worker in email. The AP also reserves the right to cancel your license at any time if they find your use of quotes "offensive" or "damaging" to their "reputation". No more quotes - I'm only one word away from a lawsuit. But a slightly braver soul can give you more details.
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In response to this policy, the bloggers on the Washington Post wrote that, as far as they are concerned, AP no longer exists.
June 17, 2008 10:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is not exactly so. The final guidelines have not been set yet. The Ap is meeting with top bloggers to work out their Fair Use policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/business/media/16ap.html
June 17, 2008 10:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'd urge everyone to follow jsfox's link for another perspective on the AP's new approach to fair use. I'd quote the relevant portions of the article, but as the New York Times is part of the AP cooperative, doing so would be a violation of this policy.
Which is exactly the problem here - the announced policy pre-empts discussion of AP articles. Consider the effect this can have on correction of errors in stories.
June 17, 2008 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
How bout if we quote FOUR words, then pause, take deep breath, add little dots, then four MORE, etc.? It'd be a heck of a branding move by AP. I mean, everybody would sure recognize when a story came from AP. Plus, all that deep-breathing would be great for the national blood pressure levels.
Those of us who already know how to talk out of our arse are used to this restriction anyway. No WAY you can blurt out more than four words in one breath....
June 17, 2008 11:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
You mean something like this?
June 17, 2008 4:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
like that.... only with more heavy breathing.
June 17, 2008 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had not heard this. It seems much too stringent, and something that is likely to backfire on the AP.
June 17, 2008 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's about time someone brought some order to the Internets! They're controlled by common hoodlums! If we allow this brazen thievery to go unchecked, we'll have mayhem! Anarchy!
June 17, 2008 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
You say that like there is something wrong with that?
June 17, 2008 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps someone could proactively create a huge "article" with all possible 5-word combinations of the 1,000 most used words? Let's see that'd be 1,000,000,000,000,000 words, which could probably be stored in less than a petabyte with decent compression. Then, every time the AP uses one of these phrases, we could sue them!
June 17, 2008 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
First off, the "licensing fee" that supposedly kicks in after five words are quoted is -- as far as I can see -- the boingboing site's idea of an anarchic joke. AP sets no such fees.
So everyone can relax a bit.
Second, you can quote New York Times all you want. AP is a non-profit news-gathering co-operative, jointly owned by most of the country's newspapers. It does not set copyright policy for its members, just for the stuff it puts out under its own credit.
Third, AP's initial assertion of copyright by bullying a small blog into removing a bunch of short quotations was ham-handed in the extreme.
It also appears legally indefensible, since it rather crudely flouted the long-established "fair use" doctrine.
AP seems to have realized that. Which is why it's meeting with blogging groups today to try to work out some amiable "guidelines."
Expect a lot of groveling on AP's part, and no new binding rules for bloggers.
June 17, 2008 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
That meeting between AP and the head of the Media Bloggers Association now appears skedded for Thursday, not today.
June 17, 2008 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
They (boingboing) should have done a better job linking to the supporting docs. However, the price list appears to be legit, if you check out this fee page, which seems to be the original source of the boingboing graphic.
Thanks - that's a profound relief!
Indeed, it would seem to be legally indefensible. However, we've seen with the RIAA and the MPAA that fair use is in the crosshairs, and that even derivative works such as parody are being challenged in court. Given the current makeup of the supreme court, we're (at most) one vote away from reversing fair use. If habeus corpus only survived by one vote, I wouldn't want to take odds on a less well established precedent surviving review. Hopefully AP will come to their senses. But from their initial actions, I'm not hopeful.
June 17, 2008 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nate: Thanks for the link to the iCopyright fee page. It appears that company does have a deal to "license" AP material for a fee.
And those fees do start at five words.
What the site leaves unspelled-out is exactly when such a license might be necessary.
Such as perhaps a manufacturer reprinting or posting on its website a favorable review of its product, or using a photo or video clip in an ad.
Excerpting an AP article for discussion purposes on a site like TPM would certainly fall under "fair use," for which no fee is necessary.
Especially if it's a brief excerpt that links to the original material, rather than a full-fledged cut-and-paste.
On the bright side, AP does sound like it knows it shot itself in the foot with this latest tactic, and is backpedaling like crazy.
I think the last thing the wire service wants is for this to end up in court.
Very bad optics.
Plus if blogs stop linking to your articles, you lose eyeballs, and that costs you ad dollars.
June 17, 2008 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed. I have no problem with enforcing copyright - it's essential to media creation. And I support reasonable licensing of content. That said, let's hope AP decides to be reasonable and support established copyright law instead of attempting to create new law.
Thanks for your comments!
June 17, 2008 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Stop the panic in the virtual streets.
Nothing is writ in stone yet. They said doh, oops, and they are working on something different.
AP to meet with blogging group to form guidelines
The Associated Press - Jun 17, 2008
Looks to me like what happened is that they just decided to take a very clumsy shot across the bow against abuse and thoughtlessly passed along some scary get tough things from their legal department.
See the June 13 statement posted on several blogs,
from A.P.'s vice-president and director of strategy, Jim Kennedy,
for an indication of how surprised they were at the reaction, and sort of clueless that bloggers would freak out, a "oops, we just weren't thinking this through, we didn't really mean it that way" kind of thing:
it's posted here on Matthew Ingram's June 13 blog entry, under "Update" (Scroll down to the blue blockquote under "Update") as well as several other places.
But it is important in that what's going to happen is that there will eventually be some guidelines coming out of this for A.P. use that will serve as a sort of template for many other news organizations.
June 18, 2008 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
My second link is here:
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/06/13/someone-please-buy-ap-a-clue/
Sorry my code got messed up. Once again, once on the page, scroll down to the Update.
June 18, 2008 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dang! I also put the wrong link for the first cite. It's here:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hqcKwCoLO6JDount0qNG9XSrvojwD91BEK6O0
June 18, 2008 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink