The AP unwisely chose to stir the hornet's nest of common blogger practice a week or so ago. I saw Rogers Cadenhead's post about the matter, and - frankly - didn't think much of it at the time. It seemed like more run of the mill copyright stupidity from the old media, and there's plenty of that going around. Turns out this was the straw that broke the camel's back though. Here's some of what Rogers said at the time:

I'm currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing "'hot news' misappropriation under New York state law." An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.

The stupid part of all this (for the AP) is that they sued over the practice I just used above: linking to a story and providing a verbatim quote. Seems pretty silly, right? This is common practice, and it clearly falls under fair use. Rogers points out that the quoted excerpts in question ranged from 33 to 79 words. No matter - Jeff Jarvis explains what the AP wants:

In Saul Hansell's NY Times report on the AP affair, they only dig themselves deeper, saying they don't want us to quote their stories but to summarize them. That, you see, is the AP way: the mill. That is not our way: the ethic of the quote and link. The AP is still trying to preserve its way. But, as I often say, protection is no strategy for the future.

So the "AP way" is to not link and to summarize the content (thus increasing the chance of a misstatement of the original reporting). Never mind the legal issues for a moment - that just seems like poor craftsmanship to me. I suppose it might be useful if your goal is to homogenize news and remove any emotion from it - hey - that's what those guys do!.

All of this has been simmering for awhile, but Jeff Jarvis is still following the story (those AP guys could learn a thing or three about actual reporting from Jeff). Today he notes that there's a growing "ban the AP" movement, and TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has jumped on the bandwagon, criticizing the AP's "let's be reasonable" offer - which is that the will kindly release a set of guidelines as to how you can use AP content (never mind fair use). Mike is having none of that:

So here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don' see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them. They''re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

Sounds like a plan to me - begone, AP, and don't come back until you find a clue and can figure out what to do with it.

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