[CutePuppy]

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

The problem for AP (and other distributors of the news) is that, due to rapid advancements of technology, both their product ("news") and the distribution of the product are usually multi-sourced and practically immediate, i.e. literally getting cheaper by the minute. Laws of economics of product distribution say that when product is overdistributed it gets cheaper, yet AP wants to distribute the "news" as widely as possible and get the full (undiluted) price from each distribution point.

They are trying to close the can of worms, but the distribution technology that enabled AP's and others' economic model of selling "news" has changed dramatically, from mechanical to electronic. Instead of trying to adapt and leverage the new technology model they are trying desperately to cling to laws just as outdated as the technology that gave birth to their enterprises.

abb, your comparison with RIAA is very apt, above (product and distribution in the age of new technology) applies to them almost exactly, except they at least represent the original content that can be and usually is copyrighted, while AP's only content is "news".

[abb]

You need to be on our Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™ ping list. We have been following and studying this issue extensively for over three years.

You are correct. It is a mechanical issue of distribution more than anything else. In our research, we saw a near-exact phenomenon in the early 1930s when newspapers tried to prevent radio from reporting news. For a while they succeeded - see “The Biltmore Agreement.” Radio was too popular (and so is the interweb thingy) and managed to build itself enough political clout to tell the newspapers to buzz off.

This effort by AP is akin to what the Scriptors must have said to Gutenberg 500 years ago when confronted with that newfangled printing press.

[abb]

One other point. The only product of the AP (or any other similar purveyor) is words.

That’s it. Just words.

And try as they might, they will never copyright interactive human communications.

[SunkenCiv]

Well done!