The Associated Press wants to tighten up how its stuff is quoted in the blogosphere (it's not unknown to see entire articles reproduced on some blogs) and went after a liberal U.S. blog, the Drudge Retort. The reaction has been entirely predictable. AP has backed off somewhat.
The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.
The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.
Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them.
Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.
On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.
The LAT wrote the following in an editorial published today under the headline AP pulls a Metallica:
Representatives of the AP and the Media Bloggers Assn. are expected to meet today, and the AP might offer guidelines for what it considers acceptable uses of its material. But courts decide copyright disputes on a case-by-case basis, and there's a well-established fair-use defense for using excerpts for the sake of commentary. A better strategy for the AP would be to promote its work to bloggers, who can help elevate it above the online news din. After all, the problem for most news sources isn't that too many people misappropriate their work online, it's that too few see it at all.