Comments on: AP: That’ll be $2.50 a word for copy-paste, thanks

By: AP backpedaling? at Hoyden About Town

AP backpedaling? at Hoyden About Town — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:27:01 +0000

[...] posted last week about AP’s Cease and Desist posturing over a blogger using short excerpts from their articles (with attribution and [...]

By: amandaw

amandaw — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:59:40 +0000

You would think the AP had learned from the RIAA debacle. It’s like the Prohibition — there are some things you just can’t stop.

Intellectual property is in for a huge reconfiguring in the coming years. The internet and especially the blogs have changed the culture of information and its spread. In blogs, the presence and passing-on of information, even word-for-word quoting, is a given, and the focus is on building on each other’s ideas, with credit to any influences but not so strict and formal as the IP of yore. You have to wonder what the AP thinks people did before the printing press — take their friend to court for repeating the same story they’d told the day before?

By: Lauredhel

Lauredhel — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:02:07 +0000

Meg: SixApart stuffed up a lot, but they've finally started to get their act together.

By: earlgreyrooibos

earlgreyrooibos — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:20:37 +0000

I know I’m going to start avoiding linking to AP articles in my blog. There are plenty of news sources out there — I don’t need them. Of course, my blog is low-traffic, but even if 100 low-traffic blogs stopped linking to AP stories, that could do some damage.

By: Meg Thornton

Meg Thornton — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:00:27 +0000

Some further fun and games – apparently they’re attempting to claim that rephrasing what’s in an AP story is an infringement of copyright as well (in other words, not only do they own the news story, they also own the events). Plus their list of terms and conditions states you’re not allowed to on-publish anything of theirs if you’re going to use it to criticise either AP, their service, or to say something derogatory about any of the participants in the events the story is regarding. Which rather puts the kybosh on crime reporting, if one thinks about these things.

As to the comment about big business attempting to exploit blogging – the first businesses which attempted to exploit the “blogosphere” phenomenon were the ones who hosted blog sites. The most notable example of this being SixApart, who purchased the rather popular Livejournal blog/community infrastructure, and then proceeded to give lessons in “how to lose clients and annoy people” as they attempted to make money from the whole thing. The funny thing is, if they’d just left things alone, they wouldn’t have lost anywhere near as many customers (or had a lot of people decide not to bother with maintaining paid accounts or similar).

I believe the central mantra which needs to be dinned into the heads of every executive who deals with anything online is “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it”.

Meg Thorntons last blog post..I cannot remain silent any longer.

By: Lauredhel

Lauredhel — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:06:49 +0000

There are examples coming from all directions of big business peering out and saying, “How can we exploit this new ‘blogging’ thingy?”

Add that to people “monetising” their blogs and the inevitable get-rich-quick disappointment, and I think that the various ways in which the tension between the capitalist information economy and the gift information economy will be contested and resolved are likely to be one of the Next Big Things in internet sociology over the next decade.

By: ampersand duck

ampersand duck — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:46:05 +0000

TUH. Typical ‘what’s in it for us’ reaction from mainstream media.

It’ll cost them a LOT more money chasing down bloggers and proving whatever they’re trying to prove. And how many readers do they get who follow on from mentions of newsworthy items on blogs? How many will they lose if bloggers get offended by this issue?

Methinks they protest too much.