AP Threatens News Aggregation Site for Short Excerpts
Rogers Cadenhead, a controversial but long standing figure in the RSS community, has disclosed a DMCA take-down letter he's received from the Associated Press demanding the removal of small excerpts of AP content on his community news site Drudge.com. It's hard to take anyone too seriously who's built a site by squatting on some other sensationalist's name for ten years - but that's what we've got here, a legal spat between a smarmy little social news site and the biggest purveyors of news in bulk in the US (AP). The AP's move could impact a lot of innovation all around the web, however.
Can you run excerpts of your favorite news stories around the web on your website, with links to the full sources in their original location? Standard practice is to excerpt no more than 3 lines of a story out of respect for the original author, but Drudge.com generally played within those rules and is still facing legal trouble.
The practice generally is a great one: a website's visitors get exposed to the most interesting news on a given topic, selected by a trusted editorial website, that website gets cache, traffic and search engine optimization and the linked-to sources get links and traffic. Not everyone is excited about the idea, though.
The Details
Cadenhead explains: "None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline."
Some of the excerpts included in the complaint do seem disrespectfully long, but who's counting? The usually brilliant media critic Jeff Jarvis thinks the best response is to reproduce an AP story in full on blogs around the web but that hardly seems like an appropriate response to a genuinely complicated situation.
Cadenhead writes that the AP has filed suit against two other parties for similar offenses already. "AP has filed copyright lawsuits against the VeriSign division Moreover last fall and another against the Florida company All Headline News this year. I have no desire to be the third member of that club, but sharing links to news stories of interest has become an essential component of how millions of people read and evaluate the news today. When linking to articles, bloggers commonly include excerpts of the article for the purposes of criticism or discussion."
Update: The AP responds in comments below. Feel free to discuss.
Context in a Changing Media World
This sounds like a really stupid legal strategy by the AP, for one thing they are threatening their own inbound links and search juice. Lawsuits and legal threats seem like one of the weakest evolutionary strategies imaginable during a time of intense media upheaval.
Either way, other aggregators should take note. I've done things like this myself numerous times in my private consulting practice and we're seeing a growing number of venture funded services offering this kind of quick aggregation and excerpting functionality to their customers - in some cases major media outlets. (Watch this space Monday night for an in-depth embargoed review of one of the hottest new services along these lines.)
Not at all ironically, we found this story via Gabe Rivera, founder of aggregation service Techmeme, on Twitter. Rivera is probably paying relatively close attention to the story. His site is a great example of terrific value that aggregators can deliver to audiences, and potentially to publishers, through the use of respectfully short, automated excerpting.
There's a certain social contract emerging where readers expect full RSS feeds to be published with the understanding that they will not engage in widespread republishing of the full feeds on other sites. In this case, the AP is not holding up its side of that social contract. Maybe it doesn't want to be a participant in the society of new online media.
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This is a story that resonates strongly with me. As founder of NewsCred, I can see people use our site everyday and discover news stories that they otherwise would have missed. Our core audience is mainstream news readers, and we're sending a ton of traffic towards the AP and other media sources. Why is that a bad thing? It would be a shame if news aggregators all had to live in fear of the AP- not just for entrepreneurs like me, but for all the readers who merely want to be informed about the world around them. This issue is a lot bigger than Drudge or NewsCred or the AP.
Marshall, I think this the start of a big story because, as you point out, it is not simple. It is really the clash of two world views. look at it from AP POV - lots of real hard expense with journalists all over the world collecting news at source. Made money for years syndicating that to newspapers who could not have their own journos on the ground. But then the newspapers start to implode. Then AP sees the same online bloggers that killed their clients starting to "steal" their data... But if AP does play like this online they will lose their online audience. I am just grateful I don't have to make that decision. Methinks they will slam a few abusers who add no value and most people will cheer. If they nail really popular services that add a lot of value, well that could get nasty for both parties for a while.
How will this affect Digg, Mixx, Reddit, etc. ?
This will def. be interesting to watch. Perhaps it is time for an OpenSource or Creative Commons version of the AP - in other words maybe it will be bye-bye AP as we know it as something new and better is created.
Granted it will be tough to unseat the AP, but certainly possible. The AP just like the RIAA and MPA are realizing they no longer have the monopolistic control of society and are frightened.
thank you
the impact of the new on greed will be somebody's thesis one day
Like Shafqat, this story really troubles me because of a project I'm working on that involves third party news headlines. This seems like a really stupid move by the AP considering posting snippets of news stories is free promotion as long as the third party is linking to the AP story.
AP is going full speed the wrong way. That is great news for Reuters. Period.
Hello? Legal department? It's 2008...
I also find AP's stance particularly amusing considering this from Dosh Dosh:
"In 2007, the Associated Press commissioned the Context-Based Research group, an ethnographic research firm to study the news consumption patterns of young adult consumers, active participants in the shift from traditional to digital media. Examining the habits of individuals between the ages of 18 and 34 in Britain, the United States and India, the findings were released two days ago in the form of a 71 page PDF document."
Read the rest at Dosh Dosh, you'll read that the findings contradict this "stupid legal strategy".
http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-build-a-better-content-model-for-your-site/
Amazing example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand does.
Would that put sites like nobosh in jeopardy?
AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent actions with the Drudge Retort, and also reassure those in the blogosphere about AP’s view of these situations. Yes, indeed, we are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond brief references and direct links to our coverage.
The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers -- large and small -- in the news conversation of the day. Some of the largest blogs are licensed to display AP stories in full on a regular basis. We genuinely value and encourage referring links to our coverage, and even offer RSS feeds from www.ap.org, as do many of our licensed customers.
We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That’s not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the Internet that bloggers have cultivated so well.
In this particular case, we have had direct and helpful communication with the site in question, focusing only on these issues.
So, let’s be clear: Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but Jeff Jarvis’ call for widespread reproduction of wholesale stories is out of synch with the environment he himself helped develop. There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers.
Jim Kennedy
VP and Director of Strategy for AP
@Jim Kennedy:
RSS is an open format. RSS stands for Really Simple SYNDICATION. There's the key word, syndication. If you don't want your articles syndicated through ANY blog, media outlet, or personal website then don't offer RSS feeds. Simple. Why would you bother offering them if you don't want people using them for their intended purposes? You could offer feeds with a summary. You could offer full feeds for "licensed" companies to syndicate your story in full. But don't offer full feeds if you don't want people to syndicate them.
Another point to make. The only reason that you wouldn't want your stories syndicated in full by "unlicensed" distributors is because you're afraid that by offering them in full, you're going to lose on the advertising click-thrus from people going to your site. There's a good article on Techdirt that will dispell that myth for you.
In short, you should probably think about sticking to the old method of syndication rather than offering RSS feeds if you don't want people to use them for the purpose they were designed for.
What is AP thinking? In a world where even the New York Times has decided to provide free content via RSS feeds, AP sounds like the kid who has a birthday party and makes other kids pay for cake and ice cream. While AP may perceive that their intellectual property is being pilfered by aggregators, they should, as you say, take note that much of the information they receive is delivered to them via RSS feeds. Limiting this particular feature in any way is a terrible waste of a wonderful resource. RSS feeds are what make so much of Web 2.0 relevant – it brings the world to the users. Otherwise users have to search and search and visit and revisit websites for specific information. Being able to skim and scan my aggregator for news I want, the best feature is in the ability to link to the full story. I don’t have time (does anyone) to sift through each and every individual web site for information I don’t even know that I am interested in. The beauty of the social contract of RSS is that all that information comes to me. I get to decide what to keep and what to discard AND what I fully want to read. I don’t want my RSS feed to contain ALL that information; it would not do anyone much good. I think AP is cutting off their nose to spite their face – no one will win in this kind of lawsuit.
The big picture that AP is missing here is the fact that print has changed, news has changed. Sound bytes are old news; tags and headlines are what’s hot on the internet, not fully fleshed out in depth stories. While there should always be a place for this type of information, the way many people get the news they want has changed. The paradigm has shifted and AP should catch up to the non-linear web of networking information.
The AP is doing nothing more than throwing their weight around and attempting to prop up their declining and dying business model.
The plain fact of the matter is that the world has changed and passed the Associated Press by.. They are frightened by their delining market share, angry that they no longer control access or mold opinion and bitter that they failed to adapt
We no longer need the AP to act as the gate keepers to news and information.
The Drudge retort issue and the other lawsuits are all about Money and the fact that AP is struggling to remain relevant.
Shame on the Associated Press.
I wanted to add one last comment in reponse to the following comment by Jim Kennedy of the AP.
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Kennedy Said: "The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers -- large and small -- in the news conversation of the day. Some of the largest blogs are licensed to display AP stories in full on a regular basis. We genuinely value and encourage referring links to our coverage, and even offer RSS feeds from www.ap.org, as do many of our licensed customers."
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I think the unsaid meaning here is bloggers are free to particpate in the news conversation of the day as long as you pay the AP. It's pretty clear from recent lawsuits that the Associated Press feels entitled to own the news. The AP has enjoyed a monopoly for probably much too long I fear.
The facts of the news are in the Public Domain the facts of the news are Publici juris and no business may own the rights to fact not even the AP.
It is also clear that the AP has made the "Strategic" decision to use the faulty and nebulous doctrine of Hot News misappropriation as web 2.0, the internet and modern communications threaten their very existence.
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