This morning, a friend linked to an Associated Press article, and tweeted, "we feel that the time has come for the cat to wear a bell, and are confident in swift enbellment of the cat." And looking at the article, I have to agree.
The article in question covers the leaders of the Associated Press and News Corp making a lot of noise at the World Media Summit about how the time has come for news services to stand up to news aggregators and search engines and demand payment.
AP chief exec Tom Curley said that more people were using websites such as Wikipedia and Facebook to catch breaking news, rather than traditional news sites, and that services such as AP and News Corp need to act now to regain control of the news content they provide.
That’s right, Tom! Take back the web! Why, how dare those search engines and news aggregators and other such sites have the temerity to publicize your content for you? Let’s not forget, this is the organization that once claimed they would charge bloggers $675 a word for the “fair use” of excerpts longer than ten words, and then retracted the claim but refused to be specific about any new guidelines.
I really like the paragraph further down the page where it talks about the AP planning to set up a plagiarism-detection system to “help boost revenue for the not-for-profit news cooperative”. Did they actually write that with a straight face? If they’re not-for-profit, shouldn’t they be concerned about things other than their revenues?
(Well, all right, to be fair, the quote also mentions the AP’s member newspapers. Still, it looks funny on first read-through.)
You know what Google should do? Google should simply remove the AP and its member papers from its services entirely. No Google News, no Google Blogs if the papers host blogs, no Google search engine indexing at all. Let the AP be entirely defunct as far as Google is concerned.
Then the AP could just find out what would happen to its precious revenue.
Edit: Edited to remove direct link to and quoting in excess of ten words from the AP article. Just in case.
Because of AP’s position I won’t pick up or quote any AP news story, either from the AP or one of their papers, because we can’t really take the risk that they will sue us.
Not-For-Profit places (companies?) still need to generate revenue to stay in business.
But I agree if Google (and the others) pulled them from the search engines they’d change their story quick enough!
The other thing is, AP doesn’t get to decide how little “fair use” is. They can decide how little you can use before they hassle you, but the courts decide fair use. (I think)
Rupert Murdoch called those who use their services in searches and blogs “content kleptomaniacs.”
This needs to go up there with the word “pirates” as the best use of a denigrating word to describe a major segment of your own audience…
If you don’t want Google to index your web pages, you can:
1. Add a snippet of code to your site template, or to the top of each individual web page: the “Robots exclusion standard” takes care of things. Or …
2. Contact Google and tell them not to include your site in their search results. Or …
3. Pretend that options 1) and 2) above are impossible, and then insist that your content is being stolen, and then demand that Google must pay you a large amount of money.
The AP would do better to think of Google as a colleague, rather than an adversary. Perhaps the AP is trying to raise this issue from the dead, at this time when Google is a bit vulnerable from the negative publicity generated by the Google Book Search Settlement.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
How about not stealing content for your profit in blogs…after all…you sell ad content. Try writing your own take from the story line instead of making a buck off of someone else’s back and then crying when they call the bloggers on it. Most stories allow you to post on Myspace and Facebook, they are concerned when you copy and paste it to a blog to which you make money from it and they make none. It’s called business…in the USSA, you are all having a problem with understanding that you are NOT owed this kind of living. I’m sure if you simply referenced the article and then proceeded to be original (oh…my…what a concept?!) then there would be no problems. Most blogs I’ve seen are really worthless and are nothing more than theft with nothing really to gain from their so-called ‘insight’ other than a few sentences of 3rd grade quality intelligence and humor (reference the above article please). Bloggers where quaint when it came out…now they are simply regurgitated nonsense and theft. Boo hoo.