AP launches campaign against Internet "misappropriation" [ArsTechnica]
Even though sites like Google News and other news aggregators have been around for years now, scouring the Internet for the latest news and organizing and making it searchable, apparently the Associated Press has decided that it has had enough of these sites. AP Chairman Dean Singleton announced yesterday that the newsgathering organization was mounting a "aggressive effort" to stop the "misappropriation" of its work by online news aggregators.
Singleton and the AP's effort is set to be based on an obscure legal doctrine called misappropriation. It's not copyright infringement, which is a lot easier to spot. Misappropriation involves whether the AP has a monopoly on a news story's reporting for a period of time, restricting even fair use of headlines or summaries of stories. So even though Google News and others link back to the original AP stories they index, the AP is asserting that they own the story and Google is stealing their reporting by republishing the headline and opening paragraph.
Time will tell whether the AP's legal argument holds water. The misappropriation doctrine is based on a 1918 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether rival news organizations could simply repackage a summary of their competitor's original reporting. At that time, the Court decided to create the misappropriation doctrine to prevent free riders from making off with the news that their competitor had invested resources to report. The question for today's courts will be whether the 1918 case is analogous when sites like Google News avoid passing AP stories off as their own and link back to the AP's content.
The underlying issue of the continued viability of the newspaper business in an online world is what's in play here. The AP relies upon news organizations to subscribe to its content to maintain profitability, and the number of subscribers is decreasing, likely due to the proliferation of online news. But, I question whether the AP is biting the hand that may feed it during the coming years in asserting that online news is stealing their content. Based on the AP stories I've read on Google News, it appears that Google itself subscribes to the AP's content. Why couldn't the AP structure content subscriptions for news web sites based on viewership or another metric that supports quality reporting from the AP while allowing the widest possible audience access to that reporting?
If we are learning anything from the explosive expansion of the Internet, it's probably best to remember the old saying..."If you can't beat them, join them." I'm keeping that in mind when it comes to video.
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