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What's Fair Use, Anyway? AP Has a Thought, and So Do I

By Pamela Jones et al.

Now that AP has purported to establish fair use guidelines that would make 5 words licensable as *not* fair use, I thought I'd explain a bit about fair use and about why Groklaw no longer will link to or quote from any AP articles. I've seen reports that AP has backed off in some not quite clear-to-me way, but I notice their list of fees remains online.

To begin, since AP asserts therein a fee for 5 words or more, let's see what 4 words look like, shall we? Remember, they claim you have to pay $12.50 for 5-25 words, so you can only safely quote 4, if I've understood the 'AP Personal Version Fair Use Copyright Act'. So let's try to stay safe, using some articles from Google News Sci/Tech as a base instead of any AP articles. I'm fairly sure Google won't sue me.

Full post as published by Groklaw on June 22, 2008 (boomark / email).