AP Targets Blog Excerpts With DMCA Notices 131
Ian Lamont points us to The Industry Standard, which reports that the Associated Press has filed DMCA takedown notices against news site 'The Drudge Retort' for excerpting portions of AP news releases. The site's creator, Rogers Cadenhead, has posted his analysis of the letters sent to him by the AP. Employees of the AP have defended the notices in posts on various blogs, saying, "We get concerned 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 you and others have cultivated so well."
Does this mean.. (Score:5, Interesting)
that /. could fall within the AP's sights as well? I glanced drudge.com and it looks like they have even less of a story on their front page than /. does. Of course here most (if not all) of the stories are prefaced with "According to..." or some other similar wording with a link back to the article.
Re:Just another attack on Fair Use (Score:5, Interesting)
Searching for a news story produces hundreds of results on blogs that are just copies of one article, and it becomes frustrating when you want to find more information rather than just repeats of the same exact article text. A blog isn't an AP newswire feed (where it makes sense for a local newspaper).
Just link to the original at a persistent source. Blogs that are regurgitation and not reference are basically just Internet cholesterol, and if you step past your vein-popping at the mere mention of a DMCA takedown notice for a moment, people should be able to appreciate the effort of a news organization clearing the clutter. This is material that is available for free from any number of outlets. It's not about free speech or fair use in the slightest. It's about controlling distribution to improve quality of online news--not censorship, or commentary, or any other conspiracy.
They're not taking down commentaries that quote or reference.
Re:Just another attack on Fair Use (Score:3, Interesting)
That does not appear to be the case with The Drudge Retort (the site being DMCA'd). The site [drudge.com] appears to have a link to the original story and a short summary. I am not familiar with the site though so maybe they are talking about a different section.
Re:Does this mean.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Blogs preserve history. (Score:1, Interesting)
I quote relevant parts of articles because the AP has a tendency to memory hole their work. Those quotes are required for intelligent criticism. When you can't go back and look at the work, you have nothing but the hot air broadcasters would like you to have. When hundreds of people quote articles, history is preserved for fair evaluation.
Re:Just another attack on Fair Use (Score:3, Interesting)
Totally out of touch (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever the details of this particular case, whenever I hear things like "link-based culture" I just think how out of touch old journalism is with the Web. It's like they can't understand the deeper concepts like shared resources that linking implies.
Most big newspapers didn't really even establish much of an online presence until Web 2.0 was gaining momentum, and they're still trying to catch up. Web sites, like the Los Angeles Times, fear user-generated content like wikis because they can't figure out how to manage them. They don't trust the medium enough to embrace concepts like self-regulated systems that work through tagging, ratings, etc...
It really makes me wonder how these news sites will survive... consider that ABC News' idea of bringing in an online audience was to have someone with a laptop sitting with the commentators/anchors screening messages from Facebook; the internet is supposed to enable direct communication between individuals, not the same filtered meaningless content that's been called news for the last few decades...
Consider too that many wire articles that reference Web sites do not actually link directly to the Web site. Why? Do they not know how? Are they afraid of what people might see, or do they not trust the authenticity of the site? Maybe they just don't like the idea of people getting information directly from sources.
Re:You need to RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
There was no "So Yahoo is running a story on..."
It was actually just a piece of Yahoo's story. So I can see the issue and they certainly did not look like a typical post and reply here on