Associated Press Declares War on Blogs and Search Engines
Via Instapundit comes this from Hot Air:
At times, it’s amazing how badly the traditional media understand the age in which they live. The New York Times reports on the new effort by the Associated Press to build more revenue for their product — by attacking search engines, aggregators, and blogs that link to their articles and deliver readers to them. The AP says that even a link doesn’t represent fair use in the Internet age:
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.
Let’s just call it the Fast Track to AP Irrelevance. Without a doubt, the new policy will have a chilling effect on blogs and aggregators who normally link to their content. Unfortunately for the AP, that won’t result in an increase of revenues, but in having the entire online world ignore the AP. The Times itself discovered this dynamic when it put its columnists behind the $50 dollar Firewall of Sanity. Not only did the world fail to beat down their door to regain access to Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, they also discovered that their columnists became all but invisible in the rapidly-growing and influential New Media.
I get the strange impression the AP wants to commit suicide. The best way to do so (if you’re a news organization at least) in the age of the Internet is by telling people they can’t link to and / or quote you. Bloggers especially aren’t very willing to write “read this article at the AP. I’d love to tell you what’s in it, but I sadly cannot because, you know, they’ll sue me if I do.”
If so, well done. If not, you may think about developing a new business plan.
It is interesting – seen a couple of South African companies – specifically financial services businesses grumbling about you linking to their site. Seems to be an absolutely bizarre situation…
It sounds like a desperate move from an industry which is in the throes of a major shake out.
Well, news companies like AP hate the web because it’s a factory of infinite supply. Journalism (news), in all its forms, can be infinitely reproduced online – and thanks to that, people expect the price to be zero.
Except that AP & other Trad. media companies have built fortunes on artificially limited supply, so naturally, they’ll do everything they can to ensure artificial scarcity. This move shouldn’t really come as a surprise.
What will be interesting now is just how badly AP’s readership is affected. It all depends on how the average person consumes their news – and if they’re going directly to AP + Authorised Distributors (and not via small, personal opinion blogs, etc), AP might not see that much of a drop.
And even if the entire blogosphere completely ignores AP – will that be enough to bring it down? Something tells me it won’t be that easy. If there was going to be something to unseat AP as a provider of news, where are they?
Reminds of the story of the kid who didn’t like the way all the other children played in the playground and shouted, “It’s my ball, I’m going home!”
The kids left behind didn’t have to wait long before someone brought a new ball to play with, but they stayed in the playground, while the kid that took his ball home ended up playing all by himself.
ball = content
AP = lonely kid
The playground and the way we play in it is not going to change as a result of one kid moaning. It’s evolved through the way we all use it. Play on AP, I’m sure there are other publishers willing to come to the playground and fill the gap.
I think any News organization take that position and published any article from the
AP should be boycotted against. Freedom of the Internet is the order of the day!