Miscellaneous

Hey, Associated Press -- Take These Nuts!

If you haven't heard, the Associated Press recently caught some flak in the blogosphere when it sent cease and desist letters to at least one blog, asking the blog to stop quoting huge chunks of AP articles. In response to the uproar this caused (since all us blogs quote from the AP and other news sources quite liberally), the AP has now backtracked, and they're totally not going to sue folks like your friendly neighborhood QuizLaw for quoting from their articles. Nah, they're the good guy.

So instead, they just want us to pay them if we use more than 5 words!

Seriously. For 5-25 words, I'm supposed to pay a $12.50 license, and then it goes up from there. And Boing Boing points out something even better than this silly license fee:

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."

Considering we already had a QuizLaw advertiser drop their support after about two hours because we were too offensive, I wonder how long we'd last with the AP? Thankfully, because of fair use, we're not paying anyway, so it's a non-issue.

Full post as published by Quiz Law on June 18, 2008 (boomark / email).