AP targets bloggers over story excerpts

Jordan Golson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:46:47 -0700

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 the Drudge Retort.