With its news syndication business under direct attack by the growing abundance of other news sources on the Internet, the Associated Press announced today that it will begin to police the Web and “develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.” The A.P., it appears, wants to become the RIAA of the flailing newspaper industry—ferreting out information pirates and threatening lawsuits if they don’t turn over some of their Google gold.
The A.P. has a broad view of what constitutes its content. It is not just entire articles copied wholesale by spam blogs. The A.P. has problems with the unauthorized use of its headlines, even when they include links. Many of its policies ignore the concept of fair use. And even when it has cause to go after copyright violators, it sometimes relies on antiquated and tortuous legal theories. The A.P. is so backwards in its thinking that we’ve banned links to all of its stories on TechCrunch.
Now it wants to go after unauthorized use if its news articles across the Web. Forget for a moment that its notion of what constitutes unauthorized use may not hold up in a court of law. The A.P. is going directly after the search engines and news aggregators which often point traffic away from A.P. sources directly at the supposed infringers.
So how exactly does the A.P. plan on policing the Internet? Here I must rely on informed speculation, but I think I have a pretty good idea. The A.P. already monitors the Web for any partial or whole re-use of its articles and photos through a partnership with Attributor, a startup that has indexed the Web and can find any content for which it has a digital fingerprint. After identifying the worst offenders through Attributor, the A.P. could simply present that list to Google or any other site pointing to those offending sites and demand action. This action could be anything from redirecting links to A.P.-sanctioned sites to demanding a portion of the offending sites’ AdSense or other advertising revenues if they happen to be a customer.
Would Google comply with such requests? If doing so gets the A.P. and Rupert Murdoch off its back, and it believes there is a good chance that copyright infringement is taking place, it very well might. The real troubling aspect here is that this determination would not be made by a court, but rather placed into the hands of Google and the A.P. The A.P, for one, has already proven that it cannot be trusted to distinguish between fair use and infringement on its own behalf. And Google’s policy when it comes to claims of copyright infringement is to take down the offending content and ask questions later.
Update: Google explains its relationship with the A.P. and why it doesn’t think it should be a target in a new blog post.
though it would be fun to the ap go after goog or yhoo in the courts for use of their headlines, since they have deep enough pockets to fight the flawed legal theories
Actually Yahoo (not sure about Google) already has a licensing agreement with AP (and Reuters). Ever looked at news.yahoo.com? My guess is AP wants to extract more licensing fees.
You overpaid Associated Press execs: This is your answer to your plummeting cash flow? SUING people for linking to you?
Shucks, I guess this is goodbye. How sad. News is free now, but gosh we’ll sure miss your political bias!
Got AP ? Sell. sell. sell.
this is just going to piss everyone off… AP will be the new ticketmaster!!
off topic, why isnt techcrunch covering the creation of a private twitter-like system on seeking alpha? i dont work there, but think it should be brought up…imo
Good idea. Poorly executed.
I think there is blatant plagiarism on the web. http://www.copyscape.com/ does a good job at helping bloggers identify when content has been stolen outright.
The Associated Press is within their legal right to police this and tell bloggers to stop stealing the AP content. I don’t agree with every aspect of their tactics but there’s not much we can do.
I agree with Adam. From personal experience, I can say add that bloggers are non-discriminating – they take from bloggers too.
Copyscape is a good tool although I switched to Fairshare as it highlights those who take and don’t even link back.
“I see dead people, they just don’t know they’re dead.” BTW, that’s also a great line from a movie.
The printing press had a great 500 year run. No surprise some don’t want it to end.
Looks like they didn’t pay too close attention at how this method caused the RIAA to pretty much fall apart and turn into a shell of what it was before. This is how the companies are dying quicker than they would otherwise. Heck, this is worst than the RIIA lawsuits since it doesn’t even use the courts!
Everyone who publishes content for a living deserves to get credit for their works and they deserve to be fairly compensated for their works. That includes TechCrunch, as it would not be here if that was not the case. Why should AP and the sites that pay for AP content be villified for wanting the same consideration?
What is lost in this debate, however, is that AP provides a number of mechanisms that allow others to use their content for free or for a fee. The problem is that many sites do not use these legal and ethical mechanisms, they cut-and-paste AP content and monetize it with ads. Often there is no attribution or link back to AP or the sites of its members.
Sorry to give you this wake up call, but AP and other news providers are not in the business of providing search engines, bloggers and aggregators with “free” content that they can monetize on the backs of the companies that create the content.
By all means, use your robots.txt to prevent search engines from crawling your content. Please use DMCA notices to prevent excerpting/linking.
I believe TC and many other organizations are calling *your* bluff.
If someone steal your stuff and when you go to court and the judge says… why didn’t you put the proper locks in place… what will be your reaction?
If only you call taking a photo of your stuff and directing people to it an act of stealing. And you’re against a constitutional right called “Fair use”.
@quang What if you are a photographer who makes a living selling your photos, and the picture they take of your stuff allows them to make perfect reproductions of your photos. And they start to make their own profit selling your photos. I doubt you would be so laisse faire.
@this doesn’t add up, so what you are saying is that if I leave my car unlocked, and someone breaks in and steals my wallet, that it is my fault?
@Shane
It … is … not … stealing.
It is copywrite infringement.
It is not like physically taking something of yours.
This is good in someway, I hope they don’t go overboard with this policing or it is going to backfire and they are going to lose traffic.
Whose going to police the AP?
There you go Yahoo. If this catches on and Google starts redirecting traffic, I am sure thousands of others (newspapers and journalist) will be jumping on the AP bandwagon and before you know it Google search will be filtered down. So Yahoo just sit back and wait for searchers to switch back.
RIAA, AP, who’s next. Keep backing down Google. Keep backing down. Assuming you will.
Aren’t you supposed to take stuff down and ask later as according to MDCA?
somehow i hope people stop linking to AP stories and they become irrelevant on the web. Google should remove all AP content and when their numbers fall they can go crying in a mirror. Who needs AP?
AP is a conglomerate of over 10,000 journalists in practically every country in the world. The only thing better than the AP is NPR and Reuters.
To say who needs AP, you are asking a dangerous question that would kill many bloggers when it is answered. I don’t see bloggers speaking to Obama at his press conferences, so I question where the information would be found if they were to be ignored.
I’m with bavb63.
Google & Yahoo: stop using AP and let’s get some more forward thinking news sources in there.
information wants to be free whether the ap likes it or not. they see their customer base of newspapers dying and I hear a lonely last gasp as the patient dies… now what would be smart is if they figured out way to HELP FREAKING BLOGGERS by maybe providing easy way to find and source ap data. maybe like a two way API from the AP where they push content TO blogs and PULL content from blogs to newspaper/broadcast hacks that typically wouldn’t know a good story if it was forced feed to them. Its not too late but time is short and I am 100% sure none of them will figure it out. And, copyscape is a bunch of crap. Do content providers really think people read some piss ant blog with no references or links and believe some local fruitcake came up with it all by their little lonesome. links are currency and the more the better. give me a break.
Newspapers are getting as nutty as the corporate jerk-offs that own them. And, we know where that trend got us — lazy, inept drivel wrapped in sensationalism. And, I am supposed to weep for these poor bastards and the loss of an “informed” electorate.
guess what Murdoch, I think we all could benefit from a little less of your “enlightenment.” We started a democracy in this country FOR THE PEOPLE not for fourth estate. They serve us. And, if they don’t do it right. I say get rid of em. Bunch of (stupid) losers that have seen the writing on the wall for freaking years and still can’t figure it out and probably never will.
@Barney Fife
* applause * my good man. they should pay you for this simple wisdom.
The trouble with newspapers is that it’s OLD news by the time it reaches the consumers, I no longer buy newspapers so obviously they’re looking around to boost their bottom line but it looks like they’re going to cut their noses off to spite their faces. Sad but inevitable. Bye bye Murdoch, you suck!
It’s clear the AP is trying to control activity beyond fair use and hot news. So what is everyone going to do in response? Can’t control Google or Yahoo …
So why not have the blogosphere and everyone else refuse to link to or mention AP stories. I believe TC did this previously … With no readership, there’s no worth; the result being that newspapers stop buying the rights to print the articles.
C’mon, Erik, you want us to take seriously a statement like this: “The real troubling aspect here is that this determination would not be made by a courts, but rather placed into the hands of Google and the A.P. ”
That’s exactly where the determination should be made — between the folks who own the content and the folks who make money on it. Better than in the hands of unelected judges imho.
That was my first thought, as well, but as I thought about it some more I’m not sure that’s where I end up.
It is true that 99.9999 percent of all legal issues get resolved without recourse to courts. It’s just too expensive to go file a lawsuit to get a legal determination.
Generally speaking, when it’s just a private two party dispute, it’s a good thing when the parties sort it out on their own. It’s cheaper and less of a drain on public resources. That’s why alternative dispute resolution and efforts to encourage settlement have been all the rage for the past thirty years.
The calculus changes a bit when issues of public importance are involved (see Owen Fiss’s provocative article Against Settlement). We wouldn’t have wanted the great civil rights disputes of the 60s, for example, resolved by Bull Connor compromising just a bit with the NAACP. For that kind of stuff, we needed courts to lay down the law of the land.
Here, the issue is that it’s not just AP and Google that have a stake in how this comes out. For starters, a web site that is legitimately using a snippet of AP content in a way that is fair use is going to go dark so far as Google results are concerned. That’s an end of game development for that web site given Google’s market share. There’s no easy way for these people to get a hearing for an argument that they ought to be included in search results.
Compare this to the statute that applies when Sony wants YouTube to take down a video that infringes a copyright. They have to certify in good faith that there’s a copyright violation – and there is no copyright violation when there is a fair use. The person who used the copyrighted work in a legal, fair use way has a chance to respond, and folks filing bogus take down notices can be bitten back under the law,
That doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. Important safeguards are missing that protect the public interest in free information flow, and it’s not a complete answer that it’s acceptable to both the AP and Google.
Keep in mind also that Google (as the only search engine that counts anymore) and the AP (as the only aggregator of local news from its contributor partners) are both effectively monopolies. I haven’t thought it through, but I have to think that if one monopoly cuts a deal with another monopoly that puts other people out of business and limits the public’s access to information, there has to be some legal exposure there.
Atleast 40% (some insiders say 60%) of a newspaper website’s traffic comes from Google organic search. If they want to shut down aggregators and say goodbye to that traffic, they should stop talking and do it.
If they want to shut down aggregators and say goodbye to that traffic…
If they shut down aggregators, then people will go straight to the source. That traffic would come straight to them. I don’t know how you lose traffic from killing the middle-man. You should write a book about that; it would become a NY Times bestseller ( if the paper even survives ).
I am not against what you are saying, but people think the death of the papers are a great thing, when in fact it may be a horrible thing in the short-term.
The sadder fact is that the bigger companies will fill the space of the papers. Bloggers aren’t journalists ( or most aren’t ), and won’t be able to take up the hundreds of thousands of local beats and millions of sources these companies has.
So, NY Times goes down. Who is going to do the Harlem beat? Are any of the upper-middle-class hipsters going to delve past 127th and write a story on the crime scene? Maybe.
How much money would you get from it? $50 in google ads? For 12 hours of work? Not worth it. It would be inefficient, and dangerous. Now, there is no beat. There is no news. No stories, no bloggers.
Not all bloggers are like this. Most are amazing mukrakers ( like Techcrunch ) that have astonishing information. But the consolidation of companies will occur, and the information, which * might * be free, will only be cornered within even a smaller portion of the internet.
This has happened since the beginning of time. The freelance journalist has been dwindling since over a century, and sensationalism ( especially local ) has always been center of most news reporting ( look at the 18th century newsletters, hilarious ). I am scared that not only we are losing the fight for good journalism, but we feel that we will somehow prevail when the giants fall.
The only way we prevail, is not only that information can be free or cheap, but that we as bloggers and journalist will have to work for free and cheap as well. If we can’t do the latter, then only god will be capable of bringing us news, and I doubt he has the free time.
Good for AP. I’m glad they are doing this. It’s war. A war that needs to be fought. Go, A.P.!
Very hard to make AP, a non-profit service for newspapers, into the same kind of evil ogre as a record company or the RIAA.
You people have forgotten what private property is.
BTW, you aren’t reporting the story correctly, either, because you’re so biased on the copyleftist slant.
http://www.nyti...7paper.html?hpw
The doctrine of fair use was never intended to be so massively used in itself, as Google does, for profit, as Google makes, on ads. Taking the “fair use” content and selling ads against it is the problem; not the aggregation.
Judges are appointed by elected governments. Nothing wrong with that. Let it be fought in the courts so it can be fought in the public eye, and not behind closed doors.
Personal property law and copyright law are completely different. It would behoove you to study these concepts a bit more closely before writing ignorant statements equivocating the two.
Perhaps we could have a part of the internet, separate from the web, where one has to pay for access. We can place all the self-important “content producers” there where they will not have to figure out how to make money for themselves, it will just be allocated on the basis of how much content each creates.
Not sure why you care since less than 10 people would pay for anything *you* have to say. This is demonstrated by the fact that people actively block *your* free content.
>If they want to shut down aggregators and say goodbye to that traffic, they should stop talking and do it.
Uh, yeah, they sure should. And then Google can see what it feels like not to be able to go on selling its ads against other people’s news products it has sucked up for free.
Traffic is only worthwhile if it clicks on the ads. Unfortunately, that’s the best anyone has been able to come up with for monetarizing the Internet, since the hippie technocommunies who engineered wanted everything to be “free” and were untroubled by the problem of how to get it all paid for.
You’re a dipshit.
Actually Kubrick, he’s got a point. Display ads won’t pay for the newsrooms. It’s almost like everyone here believes in Santa and Elves and that somewhere someone produces news at zero cost.
Real news costs real money. At some point it has to get paid for. When Metallica took on Napster everyone villified them. Turned out they were right. This is not much different.
Just because you don’t buy or read newspapers or likely even manage (or understand) a P&L doesn’t mean that they don’t exist or have value. News (especially editorial, cartoons) is content like movies, music and books.
Free news is more ‘new economy’ idiocy. Two years from now you will be claiming that you predicted that people would pay for news on the internet. Shut up already.
Free news is citizen media faster to the market than any BBC, What’s needed is a hookup with the bloggers and the publishers not a closed wall ethic, if this is the new tabloid business model then I suggest they get rid of the chairman and promote the office runner.
Erick Schonfeld needs to do some due diligence on fair-use law and precedence.
TechCrunch often seems to take the line that content should be free. Not every business relies on advertising for a revenue stream, and AP is subscription-based, paid for by member media.
Bloggers often have this holier-than-thou attitude in which they feel anarchy and free-use are the watchwords. Blah. Bloggers need to get a grip.
Go Babvb63! What if everyone simply stopped linking to AP stories, cold turkey? Can the information be gleaned from other news sources that *want* to be linked to, such as broadcasters, web-based news organizations, magazines that have embraced the web, other wire services, PR services? In short, is AP needed?
As for newspapers and payment online, that’s the difference between mass and niche media. It will also underscores the declining value many papers offer. I live in Chicago where the Tribune has become so content-lite, content-dumb, I am about to let a very long-standing subscription run its course. Although I am sure it was a printing error, my paper this morning actually had four completely blank pages. They can charge whatever they’d like in whatever format they’d like, if there is no there there, I’m not buying.
Finally, if AP is in a knot over Google, what are they going to do about Twitter? Currently, there are no ads, but people are constantly linking to stories, adding short comments to the links. How is that substantively any different from what aggregators do? Let’s say there’s a tweet about an AP story that links to a newspaper in Nebraska that gets retweeted many times, each time reaching another few hundred or few thousand people, driving traffic to the Nebraska paper from all over the world? Great day in Nebraska, but has this harmed AP? For that matter, how does AP plan to police Digg, et al?
This wouldn’t harm the AP, if the Nebraska paper has a subscription. But if the Tweet was from Johnyblogger.com, there would be a concern.
Essentially, you can do whatever you want to do with the content, as long as the content is licensed. That is the whole point of the argument. In terms of Twitter, I am highly unsure if they can police the social network, but they can wherever content is published. Since Google aggregates anything published on the web, they are essentially kissing up to the gatekeepers ( other than actual ISPs ).
@AP. Make sure that all your stories include a link to the press release that they are based on. Then sites who do think you add value can link to your version, and those that don’t can link to the original and you won’t feel offended. Simple!
Death by a thousand cuts, let’s hope this is the last wriggle from the dinosaur.
What should and hopefully will happen is that a new form of the AP is created, maybe the OP(Open Press) & journalist will write directly for those who wish to license (at a small fee) or push content out free, etc.
The days of the printed newspapers, overpaid salaries of newspaper execs, and paying reporters/journalists/editors peanuts is over. The net and the many outlets have opened new channels.
Just like we are seeing in the music industry that the middlemen will be ousted. The many artists realize that they don’ t need the RIAA or labels and can deal with the fans and make more money themselves
Perhaps we will see a whole Open Press setup with the tools needed, workflows (writers, editors, etc) and then mechanism for pushing it out. Oh – wait, it almost already exists, just not organized yet
Good Bye AP, Good Bye Execs, Good Bye newsprint.
I think you are onto something here. There are many sites doing this ( I think Helium comes to mind ), and that is a great possibility.
In terms of newsprint, like books, I don’t think they will ever go out of style. In fact, I wonder how many other companies look into the future as seeing the media print process as a money maker as people lose their internet services cutting back during the recession.
Internet is $50 per month, some services are being capped, and there is a good amount of the population that doesn’t spend more than two hours a week on it. Anyone under 35 would lose their mind only being on the internet for that little, but there are others that wouldn’t care to afford it.
This is a football overtime toss-up argument. I wish someone gave me money, I could give them a better analysis of the future of print correlative to cable subscriptions in declining economies.
Copyright is an exact copy of published work that you do not own and/or monetise said copyrighted work,
So I go to a blog with a financial times copy, not using the exact copyright but just changing the words a little to bypass a direct rip of the content,
Me as the end user reads the same information gets the same news but without buying the paper, plus I get to interactivly comment on the info as well as read other comments that align me to near truth.
In this scenario if a paper can allow me to do this free of charge then good if not then I will rely on citizen journalism and indirect rips.
Erick,
I think the real problem newspapers have is that they’re used to selling bundles of articles – by selling the printed papers, selling subscriptions or trying to make money off display adds. Google news and other websites/ services split these bundles and create their own bundles from different sources. If, in the past, newspapers were branded as content aggregators (it could be argued that not all scoops are truly their own and are actually copied), today, because of true aggregators (like google news), they are reduced to mere sources. They have lost their aggregator status. What’s worse is that they may not be able to sell single articles like the music industry does with single song tracks through iTunes (what would they charge, 2 cents an article?)
This is a problem for newspapers because the aggregators are usually the ones that attract most readers and can profit from it – readers like aggregators because through them they can find articles that interest them simply by skimming and not actually searching which requires them knowing what to look for.
In my opinion, if selling single articles is not possible, then being aggregators is the only way newspapers can make a profit online. Take that away from them and they’re doomed…they know it and we know it.
It’s true that google news, for example, provides links to newspaper articles and therefore sends millions of readers their way. But being the aggregator is what counts these days, and by freely using article titles and short paragraph texts, Google news and other services have managed to become the new aggregators.
I question why newpsapers haven’t partnered up and created a decent aggregator already. Many of these media companies can put down a simple mill and get one going. Very surprised their fighting the middle-man and not becoming one.
If I had all their money and resources, the things I would do… Actually, I would have so much money, I would forget I was trying to save the newspaper, and I would just buy a bunch of boats.
Google should consider just filing for a declaratory judgment; get the wheels rolling about whether the headlines and blurbs are fair use or not.
Legal issues aside, the AP is being somewhat foolish. The RIAA, love or hate it, has IP that people wanted: classic and new songs from artists that people love. The AP, by contrast, relies almost entirely on new content: most of their content is (pardon the pun) virtually worthless after a day or two after it’s published. That makes the AP vulnerable to somebody opening a new news bureau, or a new type of news bureau, and just displacing them from the market altogether.
Within just a few months a startup could probably bring together a group of reporters — there’s plenty of talent to be had thanks to the newspaper meltdown — that rivals the AP’s network. This new group might even be a little testier and actually root out stories, rather than just relying on their drinking buddies in government and business to feed them planted news.
When this became popular — thanks to the ‘net — the newspapers wouldn’t have access to this news and they’d be SOL that much faster: think the effects of cable news on steroids. Doesn’t sound like a winning long (or even medium, and arguably not even short) term business strategy for the AP.
This is very viable, but the AP has so many resources upon resources upon management. Getting people together is one thing, but think how hard it is for even AP journalists to get press passes and interviews and sources to comply.
Then think of a start-up trying to do the same thing. It sucks also because if you find those due diligence journalists, editors, and source whores, they are going to cost some money. Even if each beat costs just $20 per story, AP runs about 5,000 beats a day at least. That is $100,000 per day to compete on all their beats. Even a tenth is $10,000.
So, a start-up, just on beat operating costs, could run 3 million a year. If the management system is there, I can see some venture plunking down. But even the NY Times and Post have consolidated bureaus after trying this method and failing.
But as you say, this is a new era. Maybe you can get the Sulzbergers to bite on doing it again.
The administration is missing an easy pitch here. If the news industry is this close to collapsing, they could organize a bailout and put their own guy in charge.
Double minded about this… there’s definitely too much clipping, linking, and editorializing going on out there… top search results often yield duplicate headline from dozens of blogs, wanna-be aggregator sites, etc.
Folks at the AP need foresight … stop wasting time and look into the future of news. They should immediately offer full back-end Internet services to all the member/owner organizations…. like media/content hosting, unified search, social networking, and of course a syndicated advertising platform that (a) embeds AP’s own ad network adverts in the content and also (b) leverages the newspaper industry’s 150+ years of local, regional, and national advertising partnerships.
Consolidating redundant operations, sharing resources, sharing revenue by competing directly with the established Internet advertising networks via syndicating content online with AP ad network adverts embedded in the content. These types of ideas are what will allow news organizations to evolve and stay relevant. .02
This irks me . The AP is the controller of this information if they are so upset about this “theft” of their information
Then shut down the freaking feeds. its not like they can not do this . if they do not want to be part of the internet then stop releasing content in web friendly formats.
all these news papers and news sites can put up a simple robots.txt file that says do not crawl me .
they can shut down the rss feeds.
they can put their video in proprietary formats they can keep their information out of the webs hands.
Very Simple.
Here is the problem though.
They want the traffic that comes from being accessible and open , but they want to get paid MORE for it .
Well I am sorry but times have changed no longer do we live in a media static world . If you are in the information business you had better understand this and already be on the bus.
With information being so easy to acquire the so called exclusive is very short lived and on the web almost means zilch.
those who believe that search engines and blogs are a problem need to realize that they are just a part of a ever changing equation.
That will soon be replaced by technology like twitter. and who knows what else that will replace the slow aging search engines and blogoshpere.
there is only one thing to know .
that those who produce content are the ones who hold the all the cards . they can make what they will of the information and profit off it just the same .
They just have to “gasp oh noes!!” change their business model to account for changing technology and how to make the most from it.
but unfortunately their is those people out there who do not understand this and think that the internet is their to pay them. and all they have to do is place a paragraph on a page and make bank.
Welp its not that way anymore you had better come up with something to go along with that paragraph. and be looking ahead at how to make that information pay on tomorrows twitter.
Else you will be looking at stupid legal solutions to prevent the copying and pasting of 8 words on 32 million web technologies .
There seems to be a lot of people taking this as an opportunity to jump on the graves of newspapers and the Associated Press and saying “what if Google just stopped linking to them?” The thing is Google ISN’T linking to AP.
What happened to you? Did a newspaper do unto you a great wrong? Did your mother force you to wear newsprint diapers? Your nasty and non-discerning attitude toward all things print appears to be nothing more than a childish temper tantrum. Whatever has turned you so sour on the press, please,please, grow up and get over it. and then perhaps you will realize that without newspapers blogs will have nothing to steal content from. And that will be the end of blogs, which may not be such a bad thing at all.