The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs

new york times ^ | 6/16/08 | SAUL HANSELL

[mathprof]

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words. [snip]

The Drudge Retort was initially started as a left-leaning parody of the much larger Drudge Report, run by the conservative muckraker Matt Drudge. In recent years, the Drudge Retort has become more of a social news site, similar to sites like Digg, in which members post links to news articles for others to comment on.

[mathprof]

would this affect Free Republic?

[ConservativeMind]

Most definitely, as many articles which are posted here from news sites are actually authored by the Associated Press, first.

[Abathar]

I bet it was written specifically to address sites like Free Republic.

[devane617]

FR should go with links to articles only...Get ahead of the game...

[DBrow]

Perhaps, but I would personally archive the article on my HD just in case the AP archive changes over the years.

If the AP archived article fails to match what a blogger has clipped, embarrassment ensues.

They are getting peeved, possibly because there is information being transmitted and not paid for or regulated.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

“...including The New York Times...”

Follow the money, Baby.

[no-s]

I've often felt FR should cache the link-to items, as MSM are prone to retroactive changes or deletions. Then if they change the article we could report on the difference. We can ignore the robots.txt directive as well, since the purpose is to cache the article, not spider it.

Caching is not republishing, and differencing is news...so the excerpting rules don't apply.

[Bobalu]

we need a re-write squad to condense the pertinent facts from these sources into something we can read without visiting their sites.

Also, I am not certain but I think that reading the article and posting links to an audio mp3 file would be legal? A disabilities thing? Several sites with large bandwidth allow posting of mp3 files.

Perhaps post the article to usenet and post link to usenet copy on google groups?

Write a custom program that sucks the article from the news site and strips off everything but the plain text....a plug-in for firefox maybe?

[Izzy Dunne]

FR should go with links to articles only

Then you never get to see their "revisions" - rewording, recaptioning, and even removal.

And don't think it doesn't happen.

[Prole]

"bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright."

I wasn't aware that garbage could carry a copyright.

The vultures at the AP know we are going to continue tearing their pro-Obama tripe apart, which is exactly why they will now threaten legal action against anyone for mentioning their BS articles. Think they will go after their buddies at Daily Kos and DU?

I expect the ghouls at Reuters to follow AP's attack plan as well.

That way, we won't be allowed to discuss their outright lies and deception lest we be dragged into court for "copyright infringement" or some other technical BS.

[DManA]

Good move AP. Limit your exposure to newspapers, which no one reads.

[DManA]

Not only could we exist, we’d probably be better off if the AP just went away.

[weegee]

the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances.

Nothing "Vague" about it and it does NOT restrict to just "small bits". For educational purposes you can use the whole thing.

[Sudetenland]

This is a "Dying Media" post. AP is attempting to protect itself from being replaced by bloggers as a primary source of information on the internet.

Bloggers should unite on this and inform AP that their internet articles will cease to be referenced at all should they do this. Let them know they will be slitting their own throats.

Most internet surfers live and breathe on the basis of hyperlinks. Very few readers actually look for AP stories, they do Google searches for articles touching on the subjects on which they are doing the search. Most of those articles are blogs, not AP news items.

AS for Freeper policy, Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report has made a fortune using only links to articles.

The other likely cause of this is Liberals hate being nailed by their own words. The AP is, of course, a Liberal organization which reports the news with a Left bias. By restricting our ability to quote their articles, they protect themselves, to some extent, from being exposed.

[weegee]

Also, I am not certain but I think that reading the article and posting links to an audio mp3 file would be legal?

Both Rush Limbaugh and GGLiddy read whole articles on the radio and they even use newspapers that prohibit FR from any use larger than a brief excerpt.

[Bean Counter]

The way I understand it, sites that charge a fee or collect money for operating expenses (like FR does) have a very real copyright infringement problem when they allow people to post whole articles on a website,.

I also understand that websites that do not operate for a profit, and who do not collect any money for access or maintenance, are basically immune from any copyright violations. If someone makes a copy of an article in their online personal journal, even if they quote it extensively, it is little different from cutting a clipping out of the print version, and pasting it into an online scrapbook.

There is also the issue of what constitutes “Fair Use” which I expect will someday end up in SCOTUS over things like AP’s copyright claims. Fair use has never been adequately defined and many copyright claims are actually stepping on the toes of fair users online...

Let’s see what they actually announce, and what kind of legal challenges are mounted.

[weegee]

AP isn’t worried about the competition, they are fearful of having their words disected and dredged up weeks later.

AP stood shoulder to shoulder with Dan Ratherbiased in asserting the forged national guard memos were real.

Rather jumped the airdate because AP was going to run the “scoop”.

[urtax$@work]

For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

---

We at FR “review” work of AP.
We at FR dissect pieces of AP for DISCUSSING & EXCHANGING IDEAS.
We are not supposed to grab whole articles for our
DISCUSSIONS AND IDEA EXCHANGES.

[Sudetenland]

Also, if they prevent our ability to lift sentences from their articles and force us to use "summaries," then they can later pull those pertinent paragraphs and claim bloggers made their summaries up out of whole cloth.

Using full quotations, and copying verbatim articles for reference, holds their feet to the fire. Without bloggers having those abilities, they become completely free of any obligation to be truthful or fair.

[weegee]

Fair Use is a constitutional construct. And works are supposed to be protected by copyright for a fine time period.

Big Media seeks to do away with both priniciples that go back to the founding of this country.

Big Media wants to control thought and not be challenged on their bias or lies.