A case between the Associated Press and All Headline News is moving forward based on a 90-year-old legal doctrine which may no longer be applicable in the Internet age. A federal judge ruled that the AP can sue AHN for stealing its “hot news.”
The AP’s beef against AHN appears to have more merit than when it tried to go after bloggers for merely linking to its stories without changing the headlines. AHN itself sells news feeds and headlines to other Websites, newspapers, and digital signage companies. The AP alleges that AHN simply copies the AP’s headlines and news without permission and without paying a syndication fee, and then resells those headlines and news stories as part of its own feeds with all AP accreditation stripped out.
If that is what happened, it does sound like pure theft. But rather than simply sue AHN for copyright infringement, the AP is also invoking the “hot news” doctrine, which treat news scoops as a form of property. Hot news is defined as time-sensitive news that is gathered at a cost, which a competitor then reproduces, free-riding on the original news-gathering organization’s efforts. The Prior Art blog has a good discussion of the legal history (sentence bolded for emphasis):
The “hot news” doctrine that The Associated Press now wants to enforce is actually a product of a much earlier AP litigation. “Hot news” originates in a lawsuit that AP brought 90 years ago against a competing news service, International News Service (INS), which was owned by Hearst and later became part of United Press International (UPI). “In 1918, INS was unable to provide its clients with news stories from the war zones because, having been accused of violating wartime censorship restrictions, it was barred from use of the British and French mail and cables,” writes the AP in its brief against AHN. INS solved that problem by grabbing early editions printed in AP newspapers and sending them to its own clients. INS even bribed employees of the AP and AP member newspapers to get AP’s news before it was published.
Ultimately, the Second Circuit found that AP had a property right, separate from copyright, in the news that it sold, “arising from the labor and expense involved in its gathering and disseminating that news.” This right could only be used against competitors and only lasted as long as the news had commercial value. The case then went to the Supreme Court, which voted 5-3 in favor of the AP’s “quasi property” and upheld the 2nd Circuit decision.
Let me repeat that bolded part: “This right could only be used against competitors and only lasted as long as the news had commercial value.”
Basically, the judge says the AP can try to prove AHN stole it’s “hot news”. But what constitutes “hot news” in an age of instant communications? And how long does it last. In 1918, “hot news” traveled by mail and telegraph. It could last hours or even days. Today, a true scoop lasts for about a minute. The AP would have to show instances of articles where not only the AP broke the news, but was the only outlet to get the original story—something rarer and rarer when anyone can publish news over the Internet.
It also raises some troubling questions. Is the AP going to start suing bloggers or news aggregators who take an AP headline and excerpt and rebroadcast it to the world, even with a proper link and attribution? And what happens when the AP is scooped by bloggers, which happens every day. Should bloggers sue the AP? Will people who break news on Twitter claim scoop status, and sue all the bloggers and news outlets who pile on afterward? It could get pretty messy.
Hot news is a concept best left in the twentieth century. Lawsuits like this one just brings home the point that the AP is more concerned with defending its antiquated business model than with moving forward and adapting to the realities of today’s information flows.
Hot news?
This is not 1909 … it is 2009. AP needs to be stopped right now on this ridiculous quest to stifle freedom on the Internet.
Anjali Sen
I agree. AP needs to be stopped right now.
Stopped from…what?
Not that it matters to people, but the AP is actually a co-op owned by many of the newspapers that contribute to it, and makes payroll for its thousands of reporters, editors, photogs, etc who staff bureaus around the world by charging other news organizations for subscriptions.
If you read your news on Yahoo, Google, Huffington Post, or pretty much anywhere else, you’re probably getting something collected by an AP reporter. Or Reuters, or Agence France-Presse.
This stuff costs money. People do need to get paid. And just because it’s old doesn’t make it wrong, or bad. If Google News had nothing to aggregate, it wouldn’t be very useful.
Stopped from using an outdated doctrine like Hot News to stifle fair use.
I have absolutely no objection to their being paid. I have no objection to their charging for reproduction of their articles. I do have serious objection to them having a monopoly on the dissemination of piece of news because they found it out first. AP owns the article. It does own the actual newsworthy event.
Jut think of how absurd and outdated this doctrine is.
Thank for your point, Andrew. I’m glad there is still reasonable people around. Techies always forget technology doesn’t bring content by itself and quality content is expensive to get.
Hope one close day we will be able to get back to a normal situation, where technology is just a commodity and content is again the king.
I would love to discuss it more with you so let’s keep in touch.
Regards
Giacomo Cambiso
CEO and co-founder noodls.com
g.cambiaso@noodls.com
It’s interesting that AP is sue crazy when, traditionally, AP stories are published in print; a medium that’s depleting in sales and size every day it seems.
Do AP writers get less money when more people read their stories online for free rather than in print for however much each publication costs? Is this why AP is so gung ho to take legal action?
I always thought news is news and the faster we get our information the more beneficial it can be.
Tumblr blogs would be illegal if this stands! Dumb, 90 years ago things were a lot different.
Good point. With any new sharing service, people always hunt for the newest material. If this type of ruling stands, we all will theoretically in trouble or micro-syndicating “hot news” content.
If I tweet about something “hot” and it lands on my blog, where I have ads, do I owe them a cut of the revenue? Welcome to the new millennium, catch up AP.
So, let me see if I understand this correctly: AHN is ripping off headlines from the AP and reselling them for profit as their own, and the AP is using a legal precedent describing this EXACT scenario, and you are yammering about their business model and accusing them of being outdated?
“This right could only be used against competitors and only lasted as long as the news had commercial value.”
AHN is the AP’s competitor, and arguably, since they sold the information, it had commercial value.
Laws and legal precedents aren’t wrong simply because they’re old. Any good lawyer knows that.
With all the ripe sensationalism going on it TC the past week, I have to wonder: Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation, Arrington?
“Laws and legal precedents aren’t wrong simply because they’re old.”
No laws and legal precedents are wrong if they are outdated.
Anjali Sen
Michael, thank you for being the only person making sense here.
Just stop linking to AP and they’ll get the message.
I agree, and wrote a bit about it – these laws were created in an earlier time that didn’t have instant communications – they’re no longer appropriate.
Broadcast news does this all the time and has been for the decades between the original court action and the internet age.
Here is an example from this week. The Chicago Sun-Times breaks the hot Roland Burris political scandal story and then two seconds later Chicago radio stations lead with the story, citing “published reports . . . ”
They retransmit all the info from the scoop the Sun-Times spent money and time producing and then they don’t even give them the credit by name. If this AP lawsuit is at all actionable then the Newspapers will be suing broadcast outlets every time they retransmit their scoop before. They have to wait until that day’s newspaper have been picked up to get past the ‘commercial window.’
See? BUt don’t worry, that ain’t never gonna happen because they will move the story on the AP wire as soon as possible . . .
So where we?
Well there you go. Twitter product managers are you reading this. This what I wrote about on my blog reading twitters monetization. Let’s hope the AP wins then twitted can take all the hot tweets make them into news stories and the AP with their win puts themselves out of business or they need to buy twitted.
Umm twitter is only good for “now happening” news… like accidents and sightings.
Twitter is virtually useless for the more investigative type reporting where a journalist uncovers information that leads to a story.
See the A-Rod story, someone had to dig into it… you think all those lazy casual bloggers and tweeterers actually do any real work to break a story.. nuh uh!
http://www.obse...worst-nightmare
So yeah what does SI get if the moment they “break” the story – the story gets republished by the bloggers and other web “press”? Without attribution, what does the publication get for spending all the $$ paying the journalist to get the story?
You twitter/blogger enthusiasts are just plain naive to think that “news” happens by itself and all it takes is to record it.
No, journalist are the ones that are naive. Your time has come and gone.
As far as twitter goes, just because a journalist does hard work doesn’t give them anything but a good days work, they are not and should not be entitled to anything else. Thats the issue with thinking the old way, the “I have worked here for 20 years” or “I have put in this hard work”, so what! Life and work are like sports put out or our get out of the way. You can’t label twitter or bloggers the way you want and dismiss it. Or do so at your own risk, journalists.
Sure the blogger didn’t get the A-Rod story, but each day more and more people with the info will get it out there or sell it to those who on twitter or to blogger who will. And according to how the AP wants play, those persons who twitter the news first, bombings in Mumba for instance, thus own the content or twitter does so anyone else who reported on that news later, AP, are thus doing the same thing. Just because a journalist finds out more about the story later, doesn’t get them crap.
Trust me that day is coming very very soon and Twitter owns it before CNN, before the AP, before SI, before the New York Times, etc… I am just not sure Evan (Twitter) realizes it yet.
Did it really take ten year of the internet for journalist to realize they are going away or at least the system they thrive in is going away or going to be turned on its head?
Those who realize this first are the first to get that top spot.
Evan, if you are listening, you need to hire some those younger less brain washed or more entrepreneurial journalist ( I would avoid Jamboree, I don’t think he/she quite gets it) with contacts to set you up to replace the AP, then sue the f**k out of them. Get that market and own it. You will get your 750 million buyout. You won’t get that payoff doing corporate blogging. Maybe corporate blogging is your first step into this by getting them on board to submit their PR to you first. That would be a wise step. Then go after more exciting Sports, etc… Either way hire the best lawyers are starting filing those lawsuits.
Sorry, dude. I’m a young entrepreneurial and I’m rapidly figuring out what the older journalists know: there’s no reason to bust your hump doing investigative work because the bloggers will just steal your thunder. Oh yeah, you might get a 20% boost in readership, but that won’t pay the rent. So I concentrate on quick retyping of press releases. I can churn out 10 quick summaries of press releases in the time it takes to do even a bit of real reporting. So you do the math. What do you think the journalists are going to do?
hmmm… let’s see the AP owns Associated Content. Associated content has writers reword original source content on the web and the original article is “credited” with a “no follow” link.
Meanwhile Associated Content has high PR and gets higher in the SERPS, poaching the original content source and making adsense revenue.
Yos, AP what goes around comes around…
The AP owns Associated Content? Try again. They’re two different organizations with zero connection. This is exactly why we need real journalists _ to separate FACT from FICTION.
As a content owner, I’m really tired of websites thinking they can get away with blatantly stealing our stuff without properly linking back to our site or providing any compensation.
I’m also tired of Internet users thinking that a) everything should be free and that we should be happy that our stuff is stolen and b) that anyone who tries to protect their creative works are somehow evil for doing so. Sometimes companies like the RIAA, AP, etc go to far. But in this case, they are exactly right to sue the pants off these people. It’s one thing to take the content without attribution, but this news aggregator stepped over the line when they started selling the AP content. This headline is totally misleading and slanted to make AP look bad when I’m sure if this happened to Techcrunch they would be pretty ticked and would sue if they could.
michelle alexandria
eclipsemagazine.com
I have to agree with you Michelle. I’ve seen people borrow from my words without giving me credit. That happened a lot when the Shepard Fairey controversy hit the mainstream media. A few gave me credit, but many others did not. It happens often. I think that sort of thing will always happen, but if someone took my articles word for word without linking back I would raise a few questions. I’m sure Techcrunch would if it happened to them. The AP makes an easy target for criticism. I guess if it happened to a smaller fish people would be saying the opposite about it.
Michelle:
When you wrote the following piece did you get permission from the AP, did you pay them and are you paying them now to distribute article?
Because it seems to me that you are most certainly quoting the AP, and you most certainly have distributed the headline and other content via RSS
http://eclipsem...om/Movies/5575/
How is your use any different than AHN’s or even AP’s?
Under AP”s argument and even your own you are as much a content thief as they claim that AHN is.
Also AP claimed in the suit that AHN violated their trademark by making attribution in the articles. The same type of attribution that you yourself made.
Michelle:
When you wrote the following piece did you get permission from the AP, did you pay them and are you paying them now to distribute article?
Because it seems to me that you are most certainly quoting the AP, and you most certainly have distributed the headline and other content via RSS
http://eclipsem...om/Movies/5575/
How is your use any different than AHN’s or even AP’s?
Under AP”s argument and even your own you are as much a content thief as they claim that AHN is.
Also AP claimed in the suit that AHN violated their trademark by making attribution in the articles. The same type of attribution that you yourself made.
There is a difference to what Michelle did. She added more. She did some original thinking. Most of the content she posted was content she posted originally.
I’ve grown to resent some websites like BoingBoing where 70-90% of the content is between blockquote tags. They’re just leeches.
I did add my own original thoughts to the article. I’m also not trying to resell the article, and 80 – 90 percent of the content on my site is 100 percent original stuff. I go through phases where I do post nothing but rewritten press releases, but for the most part I’m proud of the fact that in 10 years almost all of our material has been original opinion pieces.
oh, and this isn’t from an AP story, it’s from a Press Release Fox sent me prior to that Comic-Con panel. I don’t think I’ve ever really spent any time on the AP website.
OK.. So let’s refer to this one.
http://eclipsem...uncements/3225/
In this article you or your “writers”, none of whom are paid it seems has used material from the “Associated Press” and the “Daily Telegraph”.
— Look I don’t think that there is anything wrong with that at all. But this is exactly what AP is saying that AHN is doing.
Except that AHN is paying their “writers” poorly… and you are not paying your “writers” at all.
You may not be “selling” your content per se, but you are Syndicating it.. the benefit to you is still monetary.
Again… I’d argue nothing wrong with it.. but it’s still a violation in “AP Think”.
You keep trying to play this silly gotcha game. I never said we never use content from other sites, we rarely do. And we always try and properly attribute them. Do we sometimes fail, you betcha. But our business model isn’t based on stealing from other sites and then trying to syndicate it as though it’s our own. And you really had to search, deep to even find the two examples you tried to point out.
This is not a post from an EM Sanctioned writer, this is something someone else posted in our comments section, in 2003, no less, from when we were on a different platform. Notice there’s no author name attached to the article. All of our stories are attributed to whichever EM Sanctioned writer, wrote them.
Is the argument that AP’s content is commoditized and thus of no value? As such any site can retransmit it and claim it as its own?
Fine. Let said sites go collect it themselves and find whether there is no cost and whether they should seek to retain any value.
Does this remind anyone of the Gatehouse Media case?
How could the AP better monetize their content by bringing bloggers, linkers, and others who could create a super-network?
If AHN is breaking the law then that’s an issue the courts will soon address.
But I’m interested in learning how the AP can profit from conversation starters like ‘viraliffic’ viral video…
Erick,
Nice catch. Check this, I’m very interested in your take:
http://www.morg...verything-local
Sorry, but something tells me if I made a tech blog and posted exact copies of Techcrunch articles on it daily… well, I’d probably eventually get a message from you guys regardless if I gave you proper credit. Don’t you think? Writing stories in your own words and adding some of your own thoughts is one thing– copy and paste without the inclusion of any original content is another.
I am tired of journalist ripping off twitter and bloggers by hearing about news from those sources, which are usually from the people who are on the seen live and then using that news to create a new article and calling it there own (e.g. Mumbai attacks).
What you don’t you understand. The the middleman is being cut out of the equation. Come on you really didn’t see this coming? This has happened in retail, personal ads (craigslist), and now in the music industry, film, and news.
Get on board or get out of the way. Sure people are stealing right now, but thats because we are waiting for those old dinasaurs to get on board. Once you they realize their day has come and gone and the court systems get tired of the lawsuits then the music artists, writers (tv), and journalist will realize to go it alone. The issue with these last three is the ego of the last three. They all want to be seen as famous and so they don’t want to go it alone. Being a blogger doesn’t have the same popularity as say New York Times journalist, but they do the same thing. Sure sure you journalist do a lot more digging and researching, but soon when certain bloggers become more famous (see the TechCrunch guys0 they start getting the better news stories, thus putting you journalist out of business.
This is exactly why for my solar news portal, solarfeeds.com – I personally reached out to each news source/blogger and asked their permission to syndicate their articles. 9 out of 10 said yes, because they realized the value of a niche content network. With over 100 contributors, solarfeeds has become one of the largest destinations for solar power news and commentary…it was a pain in the butt and alot of legwork to get this done, but the final product is great and doesnt make me feel like i am doing anything illegal.
scott
solarfeeds.com
AP v. INS is a common case. Most lawyers read it in first year property law. Don’t act like it came out of nowhere because it didn’t. If you’re a lawyer and don’t remember it, you may be a criminal lawyer.
In regard to your comment in the post about wheter twitter users can now sue if they happen to break a story first…
A large number of bloggers and twitter users are not publishing information that they have spent considerable time and money researching and reporting on themselves but are posting info they either just happened to witness or have found published elsewhere.
Since the court ruled that the “AP had a property right…in the news that it sold, “**arising from the labor and expense involved in its gathering and disseminating that news**” then clearly that same principle would not apply to those who on a blog or on twitter break a scoop only as a result of being in the “right” place at the right time.
For those who do publish their own original reporting of course that is a different story since this particular court decision seems to make clearl that the time and investment put into both reporting and disseminating the news are factors in whether the information is protected. And I do realize there are also plenty of bloggers and twitter users who do that as well, but I’d say that’s likely not the majority right now.
On another note, some people seem not to recognize how dependent we all are on the original reporting that journalists engage in. Without it a massive number of blogs, many of them quite successful and popular, would be out of business–and that’s just one of the less serious ways ways we’d be affected.
And, bloggers don’t just magically become journalists once they become famous (commenter above: “Soon when certain bloggers become more famous (see the TechCrunch guys0 they start getting the better news stories, thus putting you journalist out of business).” Journalism obviously isn’t about just “getting” a big story handed to you as the above seems to imply.
A lot of research and original reporting, often over long periods of time and many settings, is often required. With all due respect, that isn’t something you just “get” handed to you because you’re a well known or successful blogger. It takes skill, training, a lot of work, time, and often money for resources as well.
Yeah, but don’t you see the issue with that? So now you and the court are going to argue on what qualifies as hard work and research? 2 hours? 4 hours? two weeks? 6 months? What is the time period that qualifies it?
Maybe some people are slower than others?
So if Twitter increases its posts to say 500 or 1000 words and those Twittering the reports as they happen while they are in the situation; Mumbai. Then I would think that goes above and beyond reporting (real story) and includes reporting.
Like it or not the AP will lose this long battle. Remember it now, Twitter or something similar to Twitter will take over the AP within the next 5 years.
“it does sound like pure theft”
So, they are breaking windows in AP building and carry away servers? Because that’s “theft”.
Oh, you might be right that the AP doesn’t lose the use of their hard work. That is a big difference between physical theft and intellectual property theft. But if the AP eventually goes out of business because of the leeches, well, it has the same effect as someone breaking the windows and stealing the servers. So as a reader who is grateful for the AP’s hard work, it doesn’t make any difference to me. Anything that hurts the AP’s ability to pay their reporters is theft to me.
How many times has the AP referred to “according to local sources”… is the AP paying the local sources, which are many times the local paper?
Or how about the fact that AP members now have to compete against the AP directly online?
the AP is the biggest leech of all in my book.
No. Any journalist (citizen, professional or otherwise) worth his weight in dog shit would never offer to pay a source for comment.
The theory being that if I pay you for your ideas, I’m paying you to say what I want to hear. Failings aside, we strive to be fair and accurate in our reporting; and that doesn’t happen through planted quotes.
As for ‘local sources’ I think it’s a shame that names aren’t used more often. Granted, there are cases where names can’t be used for safety’s sake, but often times, those ‘public sources’ are people working on staff at local agencies (police, fire, etc.) and are paid by those same agencies to give information to the press.
In fact, the only valid point you make is that member organizations are forced to compete with the greater AP online. That’s one to work out.
Will.
Sorry I wasn’t being clear.
When I worked at the local paper years and years ago we would get calls from the AP who wanted get some information on what happened.
The paper was a community weekly local, not a member of the AP. The AP never had a reporter there… Next thing you’d know there was an AP story based on our work, they didn’t even give us credit, they didn’t pay us and they only said “according to local sources”
That is what I meant.
Really. Since you have no problem with copying and pasting others work, I’d like you to post one, just one, example of the AP citing “local sources” in a story. It doesn’t have to be from your experience at a weekly, it can be from anywhere. Just one.
Beuller? Beuller?
Also, IMHO, AP is right here.
Can I parse TC’s feed and put it under Technologicznchrup.org without linking back and giving out credit? If you’ll send me e-mail saying you don’t like it, can I answer “Get with the times!”?
I am not a fan of AP because of their attack after the bloggers a few months ago. That time, many people (including myself) thought that it was a matter of bad PR for AP and from the reactions of many readers here at TC, I feel somehow vindicated. Because of the bad way AP handled the blogger issue that time, now hardly anyone has any sympathy for them.
I know that the decision makers at AP are very smart and they understood every law that came into existence since 1909. I just wish that they could understand some more about bad public relations.
I keep coming back to something I read on Pajamas Media some time ago.. It’s is an excellent article and the whole article deserves a full read.
http://pajamasm...od-for-america/
AHN isn’t AP’s problem. AP is their own problem.
The AP is a dog that has turned on its master. They now compete directly with their member newspapers online… maybe it’s time to put the doggy to sleep.
2cents/ I cure insomina {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/OmzQefB4hF_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”2cents/ I cure insomina ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/UwpyWt42sn”}}}
if copying news is legal than we can also copy music, movies etc.
And Erick, isn’t it about time you came clean on who gave you a job in the news business way back when?
AHN (all headlines news) is nothing but fraud, it takes the service of the emplyees and don’t pay them. I have already complained against it but i think the US government is in the slumber wipe out the people liken Jacob Charian.
And this is not first time, AP has stood against it but earlier also there have been many a complaints that are still lying unheeded.
AHN is Fraud. Jacob Charian owes me & 2000.
I would love to write and say what a great job you did on this, as you have put a lot of work into it.