Stop Making (AP) Sense
AP Chairman Dean Singleton squawks tough about going after the Internet. Politico mulls the issue, reports the speculation is they want to shake down Google and Huffpo, other search engines and news aggregators. Politico reports some confusion over this among observers, as the engines and aggregators already have licensing deals, and anyway, are just using headlines and links to drive hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of eyeballs to the AP.
Here’s an idea. The engines and the aggregators could stop linking to AP. It may be the massive toad that squats upon the news, but it isn’t the only fish in the sea, and Singleton may sing a different tune when his news agency drops off the Internet’s primary radar screens. (Separate, related matter: I’ve always wondered why AP’s paying clients put up with AP posting the same material on its own pages, thus depriving struggling news organizations of the benefit of many clickthrough eyeballs that would help pay AP’s exorbitant fees. I wonder if there’s an unfair-use lawsuit in that. That’s apart from the other question of why clients put up with raging bias and distortion from the AP, and whether that constitutes fraud, given the AP’s daily disregard for its fundamental founding principle of providing news that newspapers of all stripes can use. I suspect many news organizations, whether or not they agree with AP’s slant, simply take AP for granted, and when they consider it at all, consider it as wallpaper.)
Back to AP’s Internet beef. AP says it’s the principle of the matter. Fair-use violations. Politico notes AP has yet to invert the pyramid, spit out a coherent who, what, when, where, how and why on the principles upon which it feels it is aggrieved.
Here’s what I think. AP is desperate because AP’s traditional clientele has been abandoning it, due to AP’s exorbitant fees. Also, because prominent client publications are either closing, declaring bankruptcy, or mulling which of those options they will pursue. The plummeting circulation figures may well mean a lot of newspapers are dropping into lower rungs on the fee scale. All of this is no doubt a major threat to AP, which needs to find a new place to get money, and has decided redefining fair-use is the way to go about it. What is at play here is the longstanding legal principle that, whenever someone squawks about principle in a lawsuit, it is usually about the money.
Full disclosure: I often link to AP material. Because due to its status as the massive toad of news, it is hard to avoid. However, in actually excerpting content, I try to be a Boy Scout about fair-use principles, and only do so in order to mock the AP for its partisanship, its ineptitude, also to slam the prevalent America-bashing and terrorist apologism.
Newsbusters also looks at the issue.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:24 am on Sunday, April 12, 2009
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
