Avoiding the Associated Press
New York Times: A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web
Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.
While I think this is will prove to be a disastrous business decision, I'm not going to throw a Net tantrum and start whining about "new media" and "information just wants to be free" and "golden era of blogging and linking and open discussion". This is the AP's choice and I respect that.
It also means I will not use their material until they change this policy.
Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.
Again, the property principle holds here even if I think exercising it in this way is bad for the company's long-term viability. If, for example, News8Austin decided to go with this system, fine. I'd find another source for news or just brush up on my paraphrasing skills.
Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.This part I don't really understand. My approach has always been to copy and paste, a process that can easily rip out any embedded software from the original posting. How they think this'll impede that kind of propagation is beyond me. They may be thinking ahead to more integrated Web 3.0 system where everything aggregates through Digg-style websites with a single click and the vast majority of people take these automated routes rather than going manual. Choke points are easier to control.
Executives at newspapers and other traditional news organizations have long complained about how some sites make money from their work, putting ads on pages with excerpts from articles and links to the sources of the articles.
Then they should have stepped up long ago and fought for themselves rather than letting a whole cultural phenomenon cement itself into place.