Below The Beltway

As the men and women who run the dead tree media struggle to figure out how to remain viable in the Internet Age, the Associated Press has apparently come up with the strategy of all-out war:

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.

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.

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

And they accomplish that, essentially, by spying on their readers:

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.

From the sound of it, A.P. is looking to make money out of each instance that one of it’s stories is linked to, referenced, or partially reproduced in, say, a blog post. On it’s face, this would clearly seem to violate the “Fair Use” doctrine, as one blogger has already noted:

The AP either has never heard of the Fair Use Doctrine or openly opposes it. I’m betting on the later. Now, it’s important to note that Fair Use is a defense, not a right and it doesn’t explicitly spell out anything about word counts, headlines, links, etc.

But from the people I have talked to, headlines and links fall under current definitions of Fair Use. The question then is this: Is the AP gearing up for a court battle? If they implement this policy they will find themselves in court by at least the EFF and probably many more.

Which is probably why the A.P. issued this clarification of their policy:

[T]he AP’s Jane Seagrave, senior vice president of global product development, tells me that all this isn’t true. It has no intent to nail individual bloggers for linking to stories or quoting headlines. It’s going after wholesale theft of its content by websites trying to make a profit off of it.

“We want to stop wholesale misappropriation of our content which does occur right now—people who are copying and pasting or taking by RSS feeds dozens or hundreds of our stories.” Seagrave tells me. “Are we going to worry about individuals using our stories here and there? That isn’t our intent. That’s being fueled by people who want to make us look silly. But we’re not silly.”

Mike Masnick at Techdirt isn’t buying that explanation:

[T]he bigger issue is that the AP actually thinks that these spam sites rerunning the AP RSS feed (which, I’ll note, links to AP stories directly) somehow harms them. These are spam sites at best. The AP claims (totally unbelievably) that such sites are taking “tens if not the hundreds of millions” of revenue away from the AP. Really? Prove it. These are tiny spam sites that get no traffic. They’re not making you lose any money. If your entire business can be undermined by someone copying your headline and a snippet of your first sentence from your own RSS feed, then you have failed in business. The AP needs to hire someone who understands basic business tenets, not to mention basic technology, law and economics. The amazing thing is that I’ve heard from a couple AP reporters who are sickened by this as well, and feel that Curley is destroying the organization. They know this is a huge mistake.

So, either the A.P. is declaring war on the open information society that the Internet helped foster, or its implementing a policy to fight a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Which one do you think it is ?