Associated Press Versus Bloggers

June 16, 2008

In another case of new media versus the old, the Associated Press has decided to try to impose some guidelines on bloggers by defining what constitutes “fair use” of an AP news story. Fair use is a legal principle which states that it is OK to quote snippets from another copyrighted work without permission of the publisher.

Fair use is immensely important to the free press and to the blogosphere. Bloggers quote news stories all the time. Very often a quoted story is an AP news story. It is common to quote a story before offering commentary on it.

Last week, the AP sparked this debate by sending a letter to The Drudge Retort asking them to remove seven AP news headlines from the website. The owner of the site responded by saying:

“There are millions of people sharing links to news articles on blogs, message boards and sites like Digg. If The A.P. has concerns that go all the way down to one or two sentences of quoting, they need to tell people what they think is legal and where the boundaries are.”

The AP retracted and said it would re-think it’s policy on bloggers.

What kind of control does the AP have? Fair use is fair use, and it would be against the nature of the Internet for the AP to come in and try to micromanage what a blogger can and cannot do with an AP news story. And as Techdirt puts it, AP cannot come in with its own version of fair use. That’s not the way copyright works. Obviously, no blogger should just copy/paste a news story and make that a blog post. Such a blogger, though, probably wouldn’t get very much traffic.

Does the AP even understand why this is called the INTERnet? As NewsBlaze puts it, the AP is only showing they don’t get the Internet.

UPDATE
I think I will join with Techcrunch and not link or quote any AP news stories.

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