Posted on 06/18/2008 8:55:36 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Bloggers, like me, are voicing their views and commentary on the news (and falsehoods, etc) of the day as is our right under the constitution. When a corporation tries to tell me I cannot comment, criticize (and more often correct) their lousy product I lose all interest in being reasonable. There are lines you do not cross because they cannot be uncrossed.
The-news-source-that-shall-not-be-named, which went after bloggers for excerpting and linking their biased and error prone ‘news’ articles, crossed that line - in full hypocrisy it seems:
1. The AP is essentially arguing that anyone who excerpts 33 to 79 words from its articles are breaking copyright law — even if they link to the article and rewrite the headlines. Cadenhead noted that out of six of the blog posts he had to take down, five of them had their own headlines written by users.
2. One news organization (even a cooperative of other news organizations) is not going to set the policy on “Fair Use” of content online. Blogs, aggregators and user-generated news sites such as Digg have been using links and excerpts since the beginning of (Internet) time, and no legal challenge has stopped them from doing that.
(Excerpt) Read more at strata-sphere.com ...
4. The AP is hurting itself by making bloggers think twice about linking to their stories — and by extension, the stories of its member news outlets. No links means no traffic. No traffic means no readership. You can see where that leads.
5. As Jarvis rightly points out, the AP is looking mighty hypocritical in asking people to credit its stories correctly when the AP itself runs other news organizations’ material in its feed without crediting them. This is obviously a very different issue, but this is the kind of thing that comes out in the open when you start a very public tiff.
It is time these corporate giants trying to snuff out our Constitutional Right to Freedom of Speech learn a lesson. It is the lesson of the market place - which is also a free market without any requirements to purchase products from any one source.
The referenced post thinks boycotting The-news-source-that-shall-not-be-named is over the top? Well I disagree.
Thanks for posting. Interesting. PING!
Should we allow AP to make its own rules defining (restricting) Fair Use or should we boycott them?
We're not going to pay AP's extortion fees and we're not going to allow them to control free speech!
AP: The Internet’s big bully slaps down the Drudge Retort over ‘fair use’(FR Mentioned)
$crew AP!
Who needs their liberal lies, spins and propaganda posing as news!
AP GIGGLE OF THE DAY
I admit to having an evil habit of scrolling through AP’s newswire every day. Convenient format has me hooked. So the very first article on the list when I popped in this morning was about a shooting at a mall in Lakeland, Florida, which the article helpfully closes by informing readers is (I gotta do a little rewording here, since the relevant excerpt is 6 words long) starting from the city of Tampa, “about 40 miles” in the direction where the sun sets. Yep, according to AP, the city of Lakeland can be reached by setting off in a boat from the west coast of central Florida and heading about 25 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. I checked back about 2 hours later and it still hadn’t been fixed.
The AP controls too much of the news and should be broken up.
I just found out today that FR is banning the use of AP articles. I didn’t find out until after two AP articles I posted were pulled. A fellow FReeper then clued me in.
Right.....see the threads linked at post #3....that’s when JimRob gave us the word.
AP had better watch out what it wishes, because it will get it. Instead of quoting what AP said, we can paraphrase it, and AP will not be in a position to argue that its statements were taken out of context because it said explicitly that it did not want to be quoted word for word.
The above does not, of course, justify use of copyrighted material beyond “fair use” but, if AP wants to make new rules, we should hold it to those rules even if they work to AP’s detriment.
I won’t miss their most often maligned reporting. It simply eats up space on FR disk drives.
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