Yesterday BetaNews reported that The A.P. is now instead assessing a licensing fee for republished content, which looks a little something like this:
- 5-25 words: $12.50
- 26-50 words: $17.50
- 51-100 words: $25.00
- 101-250 words: $50.00
- 251 words and up: $100.00
In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use” — the right to copy without permission — means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.”). It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”
More of the consequences at Boing Boing Many bloggers have decided AP can take a flying leap of a short dock into shark infested waters. We can refuse to read them, mention them certainly not quote or link to anything AP.
Why the AP decided to charge bloggers and what happened when they went after a small one.
Markos at Daily Kos has a different approach. Bring it on AP
The AP is going to lecture bloggers about what the “spirit of the internet” is all about? Laughable. And the AP certainly doesn’t have free reign to rewrite copyright law on its own. Fair use provisions exist for a reason If they don’t back off this ridiculous notion, there will be litigation, and Daily Kos will be happy to be at the forefront of any such effort. Hopefully, sanity (and their legal team) will prevail at the AP before we have to go down that path.
Perhaps thousands, even hundreds of thousands of bloggers can set aside a day and a particular story and post, link, quote AP (like Anonymous deals with Scientology) and let AP deal with all of us. Every blogger who can afford this battle can enter the legal battle. Lawyers can give their time when the little guys are pursued.
Citizens, experts, politicians can demand the same word fees for their interviews AP is proposing for bloggers.
Published 6 months, 3 weeks ago4 Responses to “Associated Press and blogs”
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I’d personally like to try them on for size, but then I’d actually have to start writing again.
Anybody else see a fishy correlation between this money-grab and the recent copyright legislation tabled in the House of Commons?
The Kosian effort reminds me of a time a few years back when the Dallas Morning News got upset at linking articles rather than the main paper site and sued a web site for it; blogs proceeded to have a “Deep-link Dallas” day to protest the DaMN decision.
The AP is losing a lot of potential goodwill here, since many web sites rerun AP material. If bloggers avoid AP-using sites and linking to said articles, they’ll cost their members far more in revenue than they’d ever collect in any blogger fees, even if such fees stood up in court, which they probably wouldn’t.
I can appreciate the staggering losses print is going through as they move over to digital, however AP relies on the goodwill of it’s membership let alone it’s readers.
I agree Mark, AP is shooting itself in the foot. At the same time consumers can learn to abide by fair use policy.