AP Says It's 'Done' Talking About Fair Use And Its DRM

from the taking-our-ball-and-going-home dept

Considering that the entire point of the Associated Press is to explain the news to people, is there anything more damning than the fact that most people still have absolutely no idea what its DRM for news system is actually about. The company has given different interviews, indicating very different things. My read on it, from these different interviews, is that the AP is basically going to track stories and sue people they feel abuse some mythological standard that the AP feels should be a part of copyright law. But, that's not entirely clear.

Danny Sullivan has plenty of questions as well, but when he reached the AP, he was told that the organization is "done" talking about these issues. Yup. The organization that's supposed to make the news clear can't make its own news clear to just about anyone... and when confronted on it, says "we're done" and hangs up the phone. That's not the action of a company with a plan. That's the action taken by an organization in turmoil, grasping at straws, that had a weak plan that never made much sense in the first place, and doesn't know how to respond to being called on it.

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How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide

from the step-up,-folks dept

Earlier today we wrote about the AP's plans to DRM the news, explaining what a backwards plan it was. The story is getting lots of play elsewhere, with many pointing to a NY Times report, where the AP's CEO Tom Curley makes some amazing statements:

"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

First of all, someone should sit Curley down and explain to him fair use -- a concept of which he appears to be ignorant. This whole exercise seems to be an attempt to pretend that you can take away fair use rights via metadata. You can't. But, more importantly (from a business perspective) this shows a near total cluelessness on how Google works. Yes, Google built a multi-billion dollar business out of "keywords" but they did so not by forcing people to pay, but by adding value to people who did pay. That's the opposite of what Curley's trying to do. If you can't understand the difference between positive value and negative value, you should not be the CEO of a major organization.

Meanwhile, Ryan Chittum, at the Columbia Journalism Review says that people should chill out because the AP isn't going after bloggers, he seems to miss a few points. First, the AP might not be "going after bloggers" now, but it certainly has shown a willingness to do so in the past. At some point, you can bet it will happen again. Furthermore, the AP claims that it's really only going after "wholesale misappropriation." Hmm. How is that defined?

"We want to stop wholesale misappropriation of our content which does occur right now--people who are copying and pasting or taking by RSS feeds dozens or hundreds of our stories."

Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want the content out there, don't syndicate the content!

But, honestly, the bigger issue is that the AP actually thinks that these spam sites rerunning the AP RSS feed (which, I'll note, links to AP stories directly) somehow harms them. These are spam sites at best. The AP claims (totally unbelievably) that such sites are taking "tens if not the hundreds of millions" of revenue away from the AP. Really? Prove it. These are tiny spam sites that get no traffic. They're not making you lose any money. If your entire business can be undermined by someone copying your headline and a snippet of your first sentence from your own RSS feed, then you have failed in business. The AP needs to hire someone who understands basic business tenets, not to mention basic technology, law and economics. The amazing thing is that I've heard from a couple AP reporters who are sickened by this as well, and feel that Curley is destroying the organization. They know this is a huge mistake.

Either way, I'm still wondering why the AP's competitors, such as Reuters and CNN (which is starting a similar wire service) haven't been a lot more vocal in trying to get more sites to look at them as a friendly alternative. We recently noted that Reuters appeared to have a much more clued-in understanding of the internet, and Chris Ahearn, the President of Reuters Media said today: "Reuters stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP." That's definitely a start, but it was just in a Twitter message directed at Jeff Jarvis, rather than a much more outspoken statement. Why not be blatant about it? Post a public statement/blog post/Twitter message/Facebook message etc. that says something like:

Dear internet: We love our friends over at the Associated Press, but we believe they are making a grave mistake in trying to limit linking and fair use of content. This seems to go against the very principles of the internet and the free flow of information, in which we believe. Therefore, we encourage you to link to our work, to paraphrase it and use it to develop your own commentary. We have our RSS feeds out there because we expect you to use them, and we expect you to do great things with them. We believe our content stands on its own in quality, and see no reason to try to hide it or lock it up when we know that through cooperation and sharing we can all build on the information -- and that improves the situation for everyone. We look forward to linking, sharing and conversing with all of you.

It's time for Reuters, CNN or any other news wire to stand up and publicly tell people to switch their links away from the AP and to their own content.

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Reports of News's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

from the disintermediation-strikes-again dept

It has been impossible to miss the wave of stories chronicling the impending death of newspapers. Some have gone so far as to posit that a country without numerous newspapers will be a threat to original reporting because, traditionally, daily papers set much of the agenda for the rest of the media ecosystem. As newspapers go, there, too, goes much of media's reporting ability, or so goes the argument.

But while the next couple years will undoubtedly bring much painful reorganization in news industry, at least one sector is showing success, and even growth. Wire services, who supply stories to newspapers, television and websites, are actually hiring. Even as the Wall Street Journal was laying off workers, Dow Jones newswire and Bloomberg were expanding. The market is so promising that CNN is jumping in, too. So, while newspapers continue down their troubled path, original reporting is finding a new way to reach the public.

And, if you think about it, this makes plenty of sense. The wire services provide news that can be used by multiple different publications -- and for news outside of local communities, it makes some amount of sense to consolidate it down to a few competing wire services. Does every major American newspaper need a bureau in Russia? That's a lot of inefficiency and duplication of effort. Having a few different wire services, enhanced with help from community members who can help lead the reporters to stories, can actually represent a much more efficient, but still quite useful, way of reporting on events. In many ways it's the same disintermediation effect that we've seen in industry after industry -- where the end result is a much more efficient machine which provides a better product for everyone.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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CNN Looks To Take On The Associated Press

from the here-comes-competition dept

With the Associated Press bizarrely focusing on competing with its own members, it hasn't been much of a surprise at all that those member newspapers have been leaving in droves. While the AP recently announced that it was going to rethink its strategy, it appears that plenty of other news operations see the AP's self-destructive decisions as an opportunity. We already noted in that earlier story that some newspapers were banding together directly to share content, and now CNN is announcing its own wire service that newspapers can tap into. Clearly, newspapers value being able to get content from other sources (especially for international coverage), and it seems that news operations like CNN see the AP's problems as a big opportunity.

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The Associated Press Competing With Its Own Member Papers

from the future-of-news dept

This should be the last post related to last week's "Future of News" workshop. One of the panelists at the workshop was Steve Borliss, who has a new piece up arguing that the Associated Press helped turn the news business into a cartel in the 20th century. He suggests that by limiting access to the AP network, incumbent papers could prevent potential rivals from competing effectively, because no local paper could hope to replicate the AP's national and international news-gathering resources. But now, as we noted last week, the Internet is upending this cozy relationship. For one thing, people can now easily get newspapers from multiple geographic areas, and they're beginning to notice that every newspaper seems to be running a lot of the same AP stories, forcing papers to develop more original content if they want to stand out from the crowd. But more importantly, the AP itself is becoming a competitor to the newspapers. For example, after newspapers complained about Google News sending them traffic, Google signed a deal with the AP allowing it to host AP articles directly, cutting the papers out of the transaction entirely. We wondered at the time if newspapers would be upset about the loss of traffic from Google News, and now this seems to be happening, with a group of Ohio papers forming their own Ohio-centric wire service in competition with the AP. As the Internet causes media outlets to increasingly compete with one another across geographic boundaries, expect to see a lot more cases like this, where former partners become competitors.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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