UnAssociated Press - Boycott AP, Associated Press

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More on the AP idiots

AP:

I'LL DRINK TO THAT: In The Mix, a bar in San Francisco's Castro district, a group of men and women broke into applause as a large flat-screen television showed the first same-sex couple getting their wedding licenses in City Hall.

"They're iconic," said Michael Groark, 61, of the couple, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. "This is a tribute they deserve."

Groark said much has changed since he first moved to San Francisco in the 1970s when much of the gay community rejected the idea of marriage as an imitation of heterosexual values.

Sitting on the long polished bar, Tom Longland, 66, agreed.

"I see a change in attitudes and I hope it starts spreading outside California," Longland said.

Hey AP -- that's 120 words. Have your lawyers call my lawyers.

Media experts are swarming over the AP's takedown notice against two bloggers, claiming that no one is allowed to excerpt from AP stories anymore. Remember the AP's idiotic assertion:

�Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,� he said. �It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.�

The dinosaurs at the AP think they know what the "spirit of the internet" is, and they claim it has nothing to do with copying pieces of information from other sources for purposes of criticism, education, or parody.

David Ardia at PBS' MediaShift Idea Lab examines the AP's claims and finds them legally lacking. They are. Without a doubt. Which is why I feel comfortable taunting them at the top of this page.

But aside from the AP's boneheaded wrongness, and aside from the law, there's one component of this story that's been bugging me, and it's this:

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

What's there to discuss? As Atrios says:

[T]he AP is full of shit here and there's nothing to talk about. If they want to take this to court, they can, but there are no guidelines to be negotiated here. They don't write copyright law or get to determine its precise boundaries. It isn't for them to determine what is legal fair use and what isn't.

The Toronto Globe and Mail's Matthew Ingram:

[T]he AP doesn�t have to offer a �safe harbor� to bloggers or other media sites under certain circumstances. The fair use exemption under U.S. copyright law already does that, whether the newswire likes it or not (and clearly it doesn�t). If it wants to get someone to say whether a few sentences excerpted on a blog qualifies or not, then it can go to court and try to get a judge to do so. But sitting down and trying to negotiate some kind of blanket pass for something that is already permitted under law seems like a mug�s game.

The dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association, of course, are walking right into that meeting because they crave nothing more than creating the impression that they, you know, represent bloggers (they don't). But anyone with an inkling of understanding of the law and principles at stake would know that the AP has no ground to stand on, and anything negotiated between them and the MBA will be ignored by the vast majority of bloggers anyway. If people haven't noticed, we're not the type of people that lets others do the talking for us. We do our own thing.

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I'm going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I've got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP -- an organization famous for taking its members work without credit -- will either back down and shut the hell up, or we'll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn't get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they'll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" -- the right to copy without permission -- means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").

It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP "reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."

Over on Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden nails it:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an �attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.� I suggest it�s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word �privilege�) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they�re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn�t amount to proscribed �circumvention.� Hey, why have laws? Let�s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we�ll save.
Welcome to a world in which you won�t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you�ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won�t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they�re using so-called �intellectual property� law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you�re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.