Bloggers versus the AP

The big censorship issue among bloggers at the moment is the attempt by the Associated Press news organization to stop bloggers from using excerpts from AP stories. It is a fairly serious issue as many of the stories you see in newspapers and on web portals such as Yahoo are transcriptions of what AP supplies. Below is an excerpt from the NYT on the matter:

"Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was "heavy-handed" and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers. The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.

The Drudge Retort was initially started as a left-leaning parody of the much larger Drudge Report, run by the conservative muckraker Matt Drudge. In recent years, the Drudge Retort has become more of a social news site, similar to sites like Digg, in which members post links to news articles for others to comment on. But Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of the Drudge Retort and several other Web sites, said the issue goes far beyond one site. "There are millions of people sharing links to news articles on blogs, message boards and sites like Digg. If The A.P. has concerns that go all the way down to one or two sentences of quoting, they need to tell people what they think is legal and where the boundaries are."

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Amusing how the NYT gets in a shot at Matt Drudge. They hate it that he has a bigger readership than they do.

A comment from a conservative blogger:

"The fact is that under copyright law fair use is well defined and needs no further clarification. By and large blogs are non-commercial, hugely non-profit ventures that fall well within the guidelines of fair use. In short while people are cringing at the thought of AP going after them the fact is that you CAN beat them in court if you know what you're talking about. If you know the law. I did when this back in the early days of the internet and several times since".

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Fausta has more

The latest is that the AP are going to levy a per-word charge on bloggers. They will find it hard to make that stick, though. One can certainly use excerpts without breaching copyright and, from memory, even a third of the whole article would pass as an allowable excerpt.

A lot of bloggers are saying that they will simply not use AP stories. If a lot of bloggers do that it would be fun. It would reduce the hits on AP sites and lead to a loss of advertising revenue for them!

I intend just to ignore the whole thing. Three of my blogs get around 1,000 hits per day but I am still way below the radar, I think. Not a bad place to be in this crazy age.