Associated Press, Corporate Bully

By Steve Hynd

Associated Press either doesn't understand the internet, or believes it is big enough and ugly enough to rewrite online reality in it's own favor.

Tom Curley, The A.P.�s president and chief executive, said the company�s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, �That�s right.� The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

�If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we�re going to do that,� Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

Of course, the folk with those multi-billion keyword businesses don't get paid for any use at all, they get paid by advertisers based upon their traffic. The two are quite different horses.

I've some sympathy for AP's complaint that some aggregators steal their entire content and get paid by advertisers for having traffic through a website with no value added. It happens to everyone, after all, from small to large. But I don't believe for a second that AP will stick by the implicit argument that their real targets are Google, Yahoo and other search engines. They'll look to establish case precedents the easiest way possible and that means they'll go after the little people with no armies of lawyers. I also believe they'll try to pus aggressively for the most advantageous case precedents they can. That means they'll start suing little blogs and websites for a "headline and link" - or maybe even just a link and small excerpt as part of an analysis which creates added value, or just because some poor small blogger has linked to AP stories too often.

My evidence for believing this is that AP have already done it. Witness their attempted bullying of Roger Cadenhead last year. There's going to be far more of that before AP are ready to take on bigger targets.

So we're back to a full AP boycott. Not just to register disapproval of AP's heavy-handed insistence that the facts are no longer free if AP have handed them - although we certainly dissaprove. But because we don't want to be one of those examples AP is going to try to make. We can't afford the lawyers it would take to defend such an action. There are usually other sources for any story and we'll use those instead. Lots of other small websites, I believe, will come to the same decision. That's not going to hurt AP in terms of traffic, but it will hurt in grassroots credibility and in public relations. That in turn will hurt their revenue in far less quantifiable but probably far greater ways. AP are making a mistake.