Posted on 06/16/2008 7:02:06 AM PDT by mathprof
The Associated Press, one of the nations 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The AP has taken notes from Stalin as far as "fair reporting" is concerned.
Fact is the b@stards at AP want Obama in the White House, and from here to November they will stop at nothing to make it happen.
Every AP article you read will be shamelessly slanted toward Obama, and no one will be able to call them on it lest they be sued in court over "copyright infringement."
The communist b@stards are going to use our court system to destroy us if we openly question their lies and deceit.
All GREAT ideas! bttt
Reminds me of a Chicago columnist who hated it when his newspaper offered an online opportunity for readers to post their remarks to his writings.
They don’t want the challenge to what they write.
The “letters to the editor” in the WWW now bypass an “editor” and go straight to the public. And the citation of the article lets it be public record what is being discussed so someone cannot say “they COULDN’T have meant it that way, are you SURE?”.
Good idea, yep they do change stories during a news cycle.
Have seen newspapers online do same thing.
robots.txt directive .... not spider it
huh!?!
sites like DU seem to be exempt from the same ban that some sources enforce upon FR.
And Snopes also got a break from Bill Gates’ Corbis (don’t even try hot linking the photo of Kerry with Jane Fonda). Snopes did add a copyright statement but they host the photos on their own servers. Are they PAYING Corbis? I doubt it.
Always love the balanced unbiased reporting.
The AP prints or posts news. People talk about that news which was printed or posted yet we are not allowed to print or post what was actually said.
I can see the next thread on FR.
AP reports.......(Redacted)......
Member #1--What's your opinion on this?
Member #2---I don't know what your talking about.
Typically the file identifies links the web crawler may not follow (this is called "spidering") using a wild-card expression. Some sites also exploit this feature to exclude crawling of links browsers may follow, so their information won't be indexed by search engine crawlers (e.g. yahoo! slurp, googlebot) or archived by the wayback machine (archive.org).
However robots.txt is only a convention. But some ninnies try to use it for self-censoring, especially to prevent the Wayback machine archiving unflattering information.
New rules: Conservative blogs can no longer use our stuff.
Left wing blogs we agree with are fine.
I suppose you’re right. But I don’t know what gives AP the right to change established law. Seems to me that AP should have to change the law like all of us instead of just, boom, saying from now on it will be OUR way.
The “Fair Use” law has been around for a while and a couple of things....first, it’s a fair and decent way to quote a source without blatantly plagiarizing it and second, most sources, although not all I know, WANT to be quoted and/or linked to.
The AP thinks it is above all this and so they’re demanding a site to take down a 39 word excerpt?
Fair Use is considered, roughly, very roughly, no more than a 10% excerpt. So that 39 word excerpt would be in compliance with Fair Use if the original article was around 400 words or so.
But hey, let the mighty AP and their own legislative body take it to court.
If somehow AP gets the Fair Use law thrown overboard, it will make more enemies than friends.
“Perhaps, but I would personally archive the article on my HD just in case the AP archive changes over the years.”
Years? They alter articles and headlines hourly sometimes.
Sheesh. No respect at all. ;)
Regards,
Brian/Snapped Shot
Ping.
at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has instituted a new policy on AP stories - they’re banned from the site.
“They do not want people quoting their stories, despite the fact that such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law. They claim that the activity is an infringement.
So heres our new policy on A.P. stories: they dont exist. We dont see them, we dont quote them, we dont link to them.”
"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is violently opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value, he said.
But he also said that the association hopes that it will not have to test this theory in court..."
How in hell can you talk about an article without reference to the title?
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