AP Gets Worried

By Cernig

News of the Associated Press' bully-boy tactics against bloggers on Friday and the pushback Saturday and Sunday which has led a bipartisan boycott of AP to spread widely across the internet has hit the mainstream media after the weekend of bipartisan blogger buzz.

In a New York Times article today, Saul Hansell reports that AP agrees that it has been "heavy handed" in it's treatment of The Drudge Retort and dragged in its executives - presumably on Father's Day - for an emergency meeting to discuss the matter of Fair Use for bloggers.  Jim Kennedy, AP's vice president and strategy director, told the NYT �We don�t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do 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.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

�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.�

In other words, while admitting their bullying tactics, saying they have "suspended" those tactics and saying they are going to rethink their policies, nothing has actually changed on the ground - the ridiculous DMCA takedowns for excerpts of 40 to 70 words that began the whole affair are still in force. Sheerest spin, just like Mr. Kennedy's previous comments which sounded good but were highly at odds with takedown suits for 40 word excerpts.

Simon Owens at Bloggasm spoke to Rogers Cadenhead about the AP's suits and what he was told also seems to contradict Kennedy's spin:

I asked Cadenhead why he thinks he has been targeted by the AP. �It�s possible that they�re just becoming more regressive in this area,� he replied. �If they�re up there selling a service that�s just headlines, titles and ledes, they can see what happens on blogs as a threat to that business. It�s hard to say though because for me they�re not communicating with me on any of this. There�s not really a dialog where they say �it�s OK for you to do this as long as you don�t do this.� They�re saying everything is illegal�This is a social news site. I have to communicate to my users what�s permissible and what isn�t, but they make that difficult because they don�t tell anyone what�s allowed.�

And as Scott Rosenberg writes, the notion that the "spirit of the internet" is about linking and summarizing is in any case just bizarre.

We are apparently going to serve our readers better by paraphrasing and linking than by quoting and linking (as I just did). This strains credulity. The �spirit of the Internet� has always been about linking and excerpting. Actually, the �spirit of the Internet� is probably even more about wholesale copying. But that spirit has always had to make tradeoffs with businesses like the AP. I hope the company�s leaders continue to step back from the absurd brink they�ve conjured for themselves.

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis gives AP a salutory lesson in how that doesn't serve accuracy in blogging, by summarizing their position "without the quotes from the AP that might better state its stance (ahem)".

So, while AP is clearly worried by all the negative publicity they have generated by their self-admitted "heavy handed" moves, they want to talk fine but not really address the problem in a substantative way. Instead, they want to dictate a set of "guidelines" enforced by the overhanging threat of legal action. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington cuts through the spin to get at AP's real intent:

Those that disregard the guidelines risk being sued by the A.P., despite the fact that such use may fall under the concept of fair use.

The A.P. doesn�t get to make it�s own rule around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it�s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of legal property rights that don�t exist today. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

And so many more bloggers are likely to copy TechCrunch's policy:

So here�s our 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. They�re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

You can keep up with the AP boycott as it spreads across the internet and sign the petition here.

Update: The news of the boycott has jumped the pond - the UK's Guardian has noticed too.

Update 2: James Joyner, who sits on the board of Bob Cox's Media Bloggers Association, says that the MBA will be talking to AP about all this. I hope that James and the rest of the board of the MBA will be telling AP that any attempt to push their guidelines beyond what is already set down in law, and thus establish a creeping precedent they can use against bloggers later, will be unacceptable. Law Prof. Ann Althouse addresses that question well today.