The Associated Press, the not-for-profit news cooperative, has filed DMCA notices against social news/blog The Drudge Retort for posting short excerpts of AP stories. In a letter to Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of The Retort, the AP believes "the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use."
The "AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation."
The AP sent DMCA notices to the Drudge Retort, demanding that the site to take down content that the AP believes infringes on its copyright. Seven notices were sent in total, some regarding headlines and first paragraph excerpts, but at least one referencing a two-paragraph excerpt from the end of an AP story. It seems the AP is serious about protecting all its stories from virtually any sort of excerpting.
The Associated Press is a wire service that sells license to reprint stories for a hefty fee to member press outlets. Contrary to what Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks, the AP doesn't have "inbound links" or "search juice" -- only member organizations do. The AP believes that by reproducing AP content without paying for it, the Drudge Retort is diminishing the benefit its pay customers get from its product. That is, why pay for AP content when you can just republish it for free?
This isn't the first time in recent months that AP has resorted to legal action against sites that it felt were misappropriating its content.
In October, the AP sued news aggregator Moreover for fair-use violations. That company, owned by VeriSign, provides news from a wide variety of sources to paying subscribers. The AP charged that Moreover was "scraping," or copying, the full text of AP stories and sending them to Moreover's customers without paying AP for the rights.
Unlike the Retort case, Moreover was accused of commercially using full-length AP stories without any payment. AP believes (correctly, in my non-lawyer opinion) that this is far outside any reasonable interpretation of fair use.
(Disclosure: Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my former boss at Valleywag, was a cofounder of Moreover)
"Fair use" is a legal term-of-art and one that is frequently misunderstood. There are a number of requirements and standards that must be met for a use to be considered "fair" and it is far outside the purview of this article to define it. In fact, it is impossible to define as fair use is generally considered on a case-by-case basis, but these are the most common determinants:
• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
• The nature of the copyrighted work.
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The AP believes that by posting excerpts of its content, The Retort (and presumably anyone else using AP content without paying) is reducing the value of its subscription service.
There has not been a significant blogger v. mainstream media copyright battle yet, but the Associated Press sure isn't making any friends with this maneuver. Influential media critic Jeff Jarvis slams the organization in a blog posting titled "FU AP". Jarvis has a long-standing beef with the AP about the organization's lack of credit for original reporting and linking when it repurposes reporting from member newspapers.
Jarvis feels the AP is "declaring war on blogs and commenters" and wants bloggers to reproduce the full length of an AP story to show "solidarity" with
Comments
AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent actions with the Drudge Retort, and also reassure those in the blogosphere about AP’s view of these situations. Yes, indeed, we are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond brief references and direct links to our coverage.
The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers -- large and small -- in the news conversation of the day. Some of the largest blogs are licensed to display AP stories in full on a regular basis. We genuinely value and encourage referring links to our coverage, and even offer RSS feeds from www.ap.org, as do many of our licensed customers.
We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That’s not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the Internet that bloggers have cultivated so well.
In this particular case, we have had direct and helpful communication with the site in question, focusing only on these issues.
So, let’s be clear: Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but Jeff Jarvis’ call for widespread reproduction of wholesale stories is out of synch with the environment he himself helped develop. There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers.
Jim Kennedy
VP and Director of Strategy for AP
Im curious to know what exactly the AP feels that is is losing here. Does it feel that Drudge Retort should subscribe to the AP in order to quote such things, and thus Drudge is STEALING from them.... or are they saying that Drudge Retort is misappropriating the content and therefore unfairly competing with the AP.
A note to readers: Almost the exact same comment was left by someone claiming to be AP's Jim Kennedy on Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine, and on ReadWriteWeb (posted by Paul Colford on his behalf, apparently). We are attempting to verify if Kennedy does indeed work for AP, and get additional comment from AP.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
No conspiracy, Ian. I am the AP's director of media relations. I work with Jim Kennedy.
The AP is becoming increasingly irrelevant on the internet. Who needs reporting that is going to be syndicated across thousands of web sites, when there are so many unique news sources out there already. I'm more interested in reading local coverage or niche coverage that often does a better job then the AP anyway. It's great that the AP values the big blogs that can afford to license their content, but what does this mean for regular Joes like myself? Am I no longer allowed to quote and link to their content? Do I need to start making paypal contributions to them if I see news that I want to comment on? Do I need to get legal training before including their content on stuff I publish? Why is it that they are only sending out DMCA takedown notices to those who can't afford to defend themselves? Digg is the biggest offender of them all, but we haven't seen them go after them. Is this because they know that Digg can afford to fight it or is the DrudgeRetort somehow a more serious threat to their business? This action is going to have a very chilling effect on their relationship with the sphere and if AP was smart they'd back away from this in double time. Even if they are in the right, the cost to their business from the fallout is going to be far greater then any "lost" revenue that they give up from people referring hits to their partner websites.
If the AP really respects bloggers like the comment claims, then why is it that they never link to bloggers in their own articles? It's bad enough that they rip off blogger stories without attribution, but to complain about the traffic we're sending them is just plain stupid. Member sites would be wise to reconsider their syndication agreements with them. Jarvis may argue that we need to cut and paste their articles wholesale, but I'm going to give the AP what they want, I'm not going to publish any of their content or links to their content since they don't seem to want hits from my website. If they want to change their approach to the web I might reconsider, but if they are going to argue that three sentences and a link doesn't constitute fair use, then I'm going to treat them like the irrelevant resource that they've become.
Note to readers: There will be a follow-up story posted shortly, with comments from AP. A link will be shared when it's ready.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
Davis -- I'm no lawyer, but I suspect you'd be fine quoting two or three paragraphs of the story and providing a link to the rest of the article as posted on an AP-associated news Web site. For example, a local AP partner for me is the Colorado Springs Gazette, so I might post an excerpt to a story and link there if I found something that caught my attention.
I'm curious, and a bit disturbed, by your allegation that AP rips off bloggers' stories. Do you have any evidence to substantiate this?
@Donald - Ripped off is probably a poor choice of words on my part, certainly everything that they write is original. What I meant to say is that there are times where the associated press "borrows" story ideas from bloggers, but its still taboo to cite them as the source for the news. It's not just the AP, there are lot of MSM sites that do the same thing. Nearly everyday, there is a story that shows up on Digg, Techmeme, the Smoking Gun or many other oddball sites that ends up getting picked up by the AP, but there are rarely links back to the individuals who actually broke the story, only references to the controversy or underlying issues. If you look at the blog coverage on this story, nearly every blogger is linking back to the Druge Retort because their coverage is part of a conversation, but the AP is more of a one way communication vehicle. It's powerful because it's so widely syndicated, but they often publish inside of a vacuum. Given how often their articles have shown up in the blogosphere, it doesn't feel fair to see them not participate in the conversation.
So Drudge posts a headline linking to the ORIGINAL story. Where is the infringement?
If the AP is sending DCMA notices for a blogger or other internet poster having published a headline and the first or last paragraph in the article, along with a link to the story, they can GET BENT! This is S.O.P. on the internet, and if they really cared, they'd tackle news.google.com but they've failed there. So instead, they're tackling people who cannot fight back due to monetary constraints.
So, a big FU to the AP! Their reporting is all the same corporate whore articles, serving their monetary interests instead of the interests of the reporting community or the interests of the people reading said material.
I can sympathize with the AP, but, what about those that want to comment about a story that the AP has run?
What if we disagree with the story or want to add a different perspective to the story? AP can't be all business while they themselves fight for first amendment rights, well they can, but it is not consistent with their own position.
I agree that slapping a news story on to one's blog, as is, is some form of stealing, but if I want to comment on the commentators, that MUST be allowed in a free society.
http://www.Hillary-Wins.com
http://www.FAIR-REFLECTION.com
http://www.CaucusCheating.com
http://www.Florida-Michigan.com
http://www.CaucusConfession.com
http://www.WallStreetChange.com
Jim Kennedy does indeed work for the AP. See also my followup post here:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/06/14/a-proposal-to-the-associated-press...
http://www.unassociatedpress.net - a new Viral Action Site (VIS) - has now come online to help chase AP and pollinate the story
Note to everyone: The Industry Standard has a follow-up article that includes interview material with the AP's Jim Kennedy. See Jordan Golson's article, AP's Jim Kennedy discusses blogs, Fair Use.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
Funny how when a right-wing (sorta) blog was shut down over photos, none of you cared. Now a left wing (and very irrelevant blog) is asked to remove a few articles and all hell breaks loose. Hmmm. You can read about it here: http://markljackson.net/2008/03/01/ap-attacks-bloggers/
Well, I have no love for the vapid AP, but the Snapped Shot kerfuffle was over photos and I think they are on much more solid ground there. Not a lot of fair-use excerpting that can be done with a photograph.
The current little witch hunt, however, is just more of the vast, croaking sound coming out of the AP.
It's probably well within fairuse in the first place and a bit like shoveling seaweed with a pitchfork on the other.
And then we get to the famous practice of fisking dubious or slanted AP reports. Pretty much fair-use all the way down.
Nice article, but it's "Drudge Report", not "Drudge Retort"
It is, in fact, the "Drudge Retort".
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