Flutterby™! : AP is to Blogs as RIAA is to Napster 2008-06-16 13:23:10.82321+00

AP is to Blogs as RIAA is to Napster

2008-06-16 13:23:10.82321+00 by ebradway 4 comments

All over the web this weekend, the Associated Press has decided it needs to come up with it's own version of "fair use". Evidently, the AP is upset that blogs are using too much material from AP stories and not directly linking. This is kind of silly because blogs that don't directly link are likely not being read as widely as blogs that regularly link. And publishers shouldn't arbitrarily limit quotations because they cannot (and should not) predict the context of the quotations.

TechCrunch and others have announced a boycott. Evidently the AP is listening... a little...

"We don't want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this." - AP Vice President Jim Kennedy

AP has decided that quote users should start having to pay a fee when they use as few as five words of an AP article. Further, AP will have the right to terminate any licensing agreement if AP is offended by the content. Interesting concepts. I wonder if a solution is to match the text of existing AP articles against the text of the web. It should be relatively easy to find untold millions of matches to other individuals, who AP should then reimburse upon their published fee scale.

I think most of the recent use of AP articles here on Flutterby has been to mock them, in general when I see an AP article I try to go find the press release that it was originally plagiarized from, but I also think that the proper response to this is a general weblog blackout on AP articles. No more links to the AP.

Happy to drive traffic to people who understand that there's give-and-take, not willing to help out the leeches.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-07-02 14:25:51.202311+00 by: m [edit history]

An interesting and truly positive "Fair Use" decision in the case of Lennon v Premise Media is highlighted at Groklaw. The defendants had used a 15 second clip of "Imagine" in a movie without permission. When sued by Lennon et al, for copyright and other violations, the defendants claimed the defense of fair use.

The case is not over, but the plaintiffs attempted to obtain a preliminary injunction calling for, amongst other remedies, the return of all distributed movies for reediting to remove the Lennon clip. The trial judge denied this motion with the following statement:

Because defendants are likely to prevail on their fair use defense, plaintiffs have failed to show, on the basis of the record developed to date, a clear likelihood of success or even a simple likelihood of success on the merits of their copyright infringement claim. Plaintiffs have also not shown that the balance of hardships tips decidedly in their favor. Accordingly, plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction is denied.

This is a clear, if as yet only temporary win for fair use, with the judge averring that the plaintiffs do not have even a "simple likelihood of success".