Intellectual Property Law

How Not to Win Friends (and Influence People)

By Michael Scott

The blogosphere has been afire about actions taken by Associated Press (AP) against the Drudge Retort last week. According to reports, AP sent a series of DMCA take down notices to the Drudge Retort demanding that the blog remove six items (including one user comment) that quoted AP headlines or snippets of content from AP reports with links to the full AP stories ? alleging that such uses constituted copyright infringement. “AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes ?hot news? misappropriation,” an AP spokesperson said in the letter.

According to published reports, the items identified in the DMCA notices contained between 33 and 79 words of the referenced AP stories and five of the six news stories were topped by headlines written by the blog user, not the actual AP headlines. Such postings are standard fare with blogs, and are generally considered to be appropriate, since it drives traffic to the linked sites (which often make money by selling ad space with prices based on the number of visitors to the site).

“We are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond brief references and direct links to our coverage,” said Jim Kennedy, director of strategy for AP. “We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That?s not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the internet that bloggers have cultivated so well,” he said. Kennedy conceded in an article in the The New York Times that the company’s action had been “heavy handed.”

The result was immediate and almost universally negative (see here and here). AP was ridiculed for not understanding copyright law, and particularly fair use, which specifically permits short quotes from other materials for certain uses, such as news reporting. Several blogs with tens of thousands of daily readers announced that they would no longer quote from or link to AP stories (see here and here and here). Within 24 hours of sending the take down notices, AP announced that it was rethinking its position and would be issuing ?guidelines? on how AP content could be quoted or referenced. It has now released those guidelines, to the virtually universal condemnation by bloggers (see here and here).

However, to many AP?s conduct is unforgiveable. Bloggers are urging their brethren to eschew AP entirely and use local and national news sites instead. By linking to newspaper websites, not only will bloggers figuratively thumbing their noses at AP, but will also be driving traffic to newspaper sites which are having trouble competing with other online news services.

AP seriously underestimated the power of bloggers and their ability to marshal worldwide forces in a very short time frame. It is a lesson that should not be lost on other companies who plan to take on the blogosphere.

Full post as published by Singularity on June 17, 2008 (boomark / email).