Funny I should choose today to cover the Associated Press story about the risks of copyright infringement and other blogging dangers…
Why, just twenty minutes later, I stumbled upon this article posted by TechCrunch.com.
Michael Arrington’s story was a worthy follow up from last Friday’s article, in which Mike Masnick discussed the ludicrous lawsuits the Associated Press had filed over the past months against big news companies and individual bloggers alike. Many of the cases revolved around AP filing suit “over quotations from their articles.” (Hah… quoting a quote about suing over quotes… good thing it didn’t belong to AP.)
Masnick, called the recent lawsuits against bloggers “pure bullying on the part of the Associated Press, and a clear overstepping of its legal rights.”
But let’s go back to the future… I mean, present. As of Monday, TechCrunch.com officially announced it would no longer link to articles belonging to the Associated Press until the company withdrew from its ridiculous copyright rampage.
Essentially, the AP does “not want people quoting their stories” (whoops, I did it again. Quoting about quoting…). In my opinion, which I believe is shared by others including Arrington and Masnick, this is just a little bit bogus. How can AP refuse direct quoting from their articles when the information is appropriately cited and linked to? As Arrington pointed out, “such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law.” Still, AP considers this to be copyright infringement.
AP maintains that this is its own form of “damage control,” and that it is attempting to recoil from their “earlier position,” but Arrington as well as dozens of bloggers and active members in the online community view the recent events as “pushing their case further.”
Apparently, AP is working to draft a set of guidelines which will detail its own official differences between legitimacy and violation. “Those that disregard the guidelines,” TechCrunch affirmed, “risk being sued by the A.P.”
In response to this, TechCrunch released its “new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them.”
Obviously heated by these events, Michael Arrington went on to argue (quite rightly, in my opinion) that “the A.P. doesn't get to make it's own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows.”
I extend my personal gratitude to Mr. Arrington and Mr. Masnick for standing up to The Man in a valiant fight for bloggers’ rights. I typically cover stories posted by Associated Press, and I always thought I was well within my rights to do so provided I gave credit where credit was due. I have yet to run into copyright concerns with AP, but I sure as heck don’t want to start now…
I’m interested to see if the Associated Press will have any response to the lack of linking from outside sources… sources who allegedly never meant harm or offense to the news aggregator in the first place.
After reading Friday’s article, I was quite entertained by the plethora of comments left from readers and bloggers alike. I invite you to check them out, starting with this response from VP and Director of Strategy for AP, Jim Kennedy.