I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A federal court ruled that the AP can sue competitors for 'quasi-property' rights on hot news, as well as for copyright infringement and several other claims. The so-called 'hot news' doctrine was created by a judge 90 years ago in another case, where the AP sued a competitor for copying wartime reporting and bribing its employees to send them a copy of unreleased news. The courts' solution was to make hot news a form of 'quasi-property' distinct from copyright, in part because facts cannot be copyrighted. But now the AP is making use of the precedent again, going after AHN which competes with the AP, alleging that they're somehow copying the AP's news. The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it."
Instead of this fancy legal term of "hot news", I use another term for what AHN is doing to AP: "plagiarism". According to nolo:
putting your name on someone else's work is still plagiarism and is unethical within artistic, scientific, academic and political communities
I guess the press is not one of those communities. I'm not a big fan of lawsuits: I was sued once by a company that wanted to put me out of business and they almost succeeded. Being right doesn't matter, it's whoever has the deepest pockets.
So in this case, I'd much rather have the community (the readers) shun AHN. It's important for everyone to know what is going on, and let the public make their own choices.
-- FairSoftware.net [fairsoftware.net] -- where geeks are their own boss
It ends at the point you no longer have a competitive advantage from having the "scoop." If I remember the case right, the court correctly noted that the facts can't be copyrighted, and instead carved out a narrow common law right to "hot news" based on a three-factor test I don't remember. There's really not much of a slippery slope here.
Covering the same story is not necessarily plagiarism, copying it verbatim would come directly under copyright but AFAICT that's not the case at issue.
Anyway:
The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it.
It made for a good joke but the AP doesn't seem to be covering this story (I was going to post the link but I can't find one).
The press isn't one of those communities because the press doesn't deal in the kinds of concepts you can plagiarize. If AHN copied AP text verbatim, you might say that they plagiarized the writing, but then they would get sued for copyright infringement. But they are merely stating the same fact as a fact stated in an AP news story, and it's a fact that, unlike a scientific experiment, didn't require creativity to observe--it merely required presence.
The problem with this is that AHN isn't present. They are merely lifting AP stories.
If they were at a new-event, there is no problem with them creating their own copy (words) and publishing. The entire news industry is based on exactly this.
The problem with AHN is that they are not sending reporters to stories, they are merely copying AP stories.
The Associated Press actually is set up for exactly this purpose (other outlets using their stories); but AP wire-service subscribers are held to certain
The problem with this is that AHN isn't present. They are merely lifting AP stories.
The problem with AHN is that they are not sending reporters to stories, they are merely copying AP stories.
I see what you did there.
But what if they weren't just getting their facts from AP stories? What if they also got facts from another hot-news source that had information the AP didn't? Shouldn't they be able to combine the facts from two stories in a new narrative to create a more complete story?
It seems other useful actions may run afoul of this, including providing a translation service. Are only the people who read a hot news item's original published languages deserving to be informed?
You have to consider what is best for society. If news is unprotected, then it's in everyone's best interest to copy the facts from another source. It's a prisoner's dilemma, and unfortunately greedy companies ALWAYS choose to defect, which means anyone who isn't a sucker will have to either defect as well (leaving us with no source for news whatsoever) or change the rules of the game (which the AP is trying to do).
and allows a reader to disable all signatures if he is not interested in them.
You answered your own question.
I'd just like to hear it from the person actually doing it, in order to decide how to respond. Why would someone want to bypass a user's preference to not see signatures, especially since it requires extra work?
There is a script floating around which will automatically insert a sig on slashdot posts. It doesn't have to require ongoing work.
Why would someone want to bypass a user's preference to not see signatures, especially since it requires extra work?
The signature in question appears to be an advertisement for a web site. Advertisers in general try to force people to see their ads. In other words, the signature is spam, and typing it by hand (or script) bypasses the spam filter.
If it can be taken, copied, borrowed, whatever - it will be. It is not physically or technically possible to prevent this from happening.
That means you are left with civil court remedies, which generally take too long to get anywhere and the penalties may be wholly out of line with the benefits. Basically, you can drive your competitors out of a billion-dollary business and get fined a million dollars. Sounds like a great business plan.
Alternatively, civil court remedies can be wholly out of line the other way, where the benefit to the offender is $1000 and they have to pay a $250,000 fine.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
I just thought I should point that out. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own. Sharing does not imply plagiarism. The vast majority of copyright infringement is *not* plagiarism.
One of the foundations of international copyright (and an aspect of it not strongly respected by the United States) is moral rights, including the right of the author to be given credit. I find it ironic that vigorous enforcement of copyright actually creates an incentive for sharers and borrowers to obscure the source or credit of material. This makes their activity harder to detect, and easier for them to defend ("I got this from AP" is kind of a dead giveaway).
If copyright law was closer to actual social practice, this kind of plagiarism would likely be much less common.
Personally, I find clear cases of plagiarism to be utterly dishonest and far worse than sharing.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
I think even much of the anti-copyright crowd is still against the idea of attempting to profit off someone else's wo
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
That seems to be insidious and corrosive though. You better hope that any physician you get had better scruples than that. The same goes to your car mechanic or commercial airline pilot too. You don't want people that should have failed those tests to go on and get employment, which could have devastating consequences.
As usual, I find that the decisions and writing of Judge Learned Hand to be some of the most insightful. From his extensive writings on free speech (which O.W. Holmes borrowed heavily from), to the present matter:
from Harvad Law (emphasis mine):
The Second Circuit was very hostile to INS for many years. Justice Learned Hand agreed with Justices Holmes and Brandeis and was quite overt in getting his colleagues to circumvent INS. An example of this deliberate resistance was Cheney Bros. v. Doris Silk Corp., 35 F.2d 279 (2nd Circ. 1929), involving two competing silk manufacturers. Plaintiff Cheney requested an injunction barring Doris from copying patterns used in dress design during the eight to nine month fashion season. Cheney relied on INS, saying its situation was analogous because the considerable expense involved in designing the patterns couldn't be recouped when the defendant copied the patterns with no similar expenditure and sold them for lower prices. Affirming the District Court's denial of an injunction, Justice Hand noted that because of the short season life of the patterns, design patent protection was impractical and they would likely lack the requisite originality to qualify. Nor did the patterns qualify for copyright protection because they flunked the conceptual separability test. Justice Hand said that, although it seemed unfair to not provide a remedy to Cheney, it was not up to the judicial system to extend a patent- or copyright-like monopoly in the absence of legislation authorizing it.
But this doesn't really matter anyway, since if you read on in the link I provided, you'll see that federal common law was abolished, so what matters is the specific state law. New York common law establishes strict criteria for the application of the misappropriation doctrine to "hot news" (see National Basketball Ass'n v. Sports Team Analysis & Tracking Systems, Inc. [fmew.com] [warning: site is ugly as sin] for how a recent plaintiff's claim was found to be lacking)... and this seems to meet all of it. It made me chuckle, however, that in that link one of the biggest supporters of the defendant in that case was the AP.
At any rate, I think we need to have either sweeping federal law specifically creating this property, or we need to have no right to "hot news" as quasi-property. The problem with the latter is then there is no incentive to do fact reporting at all, since it would be impossible to recoup the costs of it. The idealist in me says "Boo to treating information as property" but the realist in me says "Yay to having paid reporters".
Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news they want us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news THEY want us to see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
The AP is not a newspaper, it is a newswire. There's a big difference.
It's common knowledge in news publishing that in-depth reporting is disappearing. There have been reporter layoffs coast-to-coast, and more papers than ever are simply paying their subscriptions to the AP or Reuters or another news service, then copyediting the AP article (and crediting the AP, of course). This alone is severely limiting the quantity of quality news (especially local news).
However, facts are facts. Since they cannot be copyrighted, this quasi-property status is all that keeps someone from grabbing the facts from the AP Newswire, and reporting on it themselves. This can be done as quickly as someone who is giving attribution to the AP, so the competitive advantage you allow for (which enables the profit) is moot.
If we work from your example, a publisher protects their profit by use of secrecy. This doesn't work for a newswire, whose very business model depends on others' having access to their reporting.
In essence, there are two levels of publication -- once by the AP to news outlets, and once by the news outlets to the public. No "hot news" provision means that the AP's customers (the news outlets) don't need to pay the AP, or even attribute stories to them. Thus, the AP can't pay reporters, and we have even fewer reporters to dig up the facts.
Eventually, all news outlets will be just like the blogosphere, with a dearth of quality reporting, and endless bloglink circle jerks.
I, for one, appreciate the value of the fourth estate.
Newspapers should drop the authors and go back to hiring journalists.
Ha. Newspapers are firing the journalists, because they can get basic news from the AP, or Reuters.
Authors are what sell print media, since that content is not available from the newswires... and they can keep the stories secret until publication.
News reporting is being outsourced to the newswires. Since all the papers get their news from the same sources, timeliness doesn't matter anymore... and the competitive advantage from timeline
We have IP for a reason: it helps make social structures work better. As a society, we make a little deal, and that deal is a different in each of the 3 broad categories of IP protection: copyright & trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
In the copyright area, the deal works like this: the Content Creator gets a limited time right to exclusively control profits, distribution, performance, derivatives and use of the work they create as a proxy for the "property right" they would normally get to claim if they had created a physical thing. In return for this exclusive control, the Content Creator gets both benefits, but also pays a downside. The benefit is they get to profit and control the results of their efforts. The downside is that after that limited time is over, the information always gets released to the society at large. In the long run, society benefits from this deal in two ways: it promotes the creation of works based on information: digital media, software, literature, music, movies, etc....in today's world - most everything relating to media, computers, and electronic art. The second, important benefit is that society gets all the information after the limited time is over. It all becomes public domain.
Copyright is good, and we need it. Many have argued and manipulated the system to change the amount of time - but that is another story. Many have argued about how much of what one creates can be controlled, and how - and we have fair use cases that cover exactly that.
So we already have the deal. The deal works (some might argue poorly). I don't see a valid need for another, different deal.
Just because AP runs a large business and spends money doesn't mean they (or anyone) can cut a new deal. In this case, the whole idea of "hot news" is about controlling very specific, small pieces of information: scores, facts, headlines. In my opinion after a very brief read: the balance between what is good of society and what is good for the Content Creator is not met.
I do not understand why people are upset. Paranoia? Here's a nickel, go get some tinfoil:)
Unpublished news is like unpublished scientific discoveries or product developments. Trade secrets are property of the employer and the employee giving them to anyone else is simple theft and the receiver is at least a receiver of stolen goods, or may be complicit in the theft.
How can a republisher have any advantage? They have to change the words, most likely reducing accuracy. If they can prepare a prettier p
We have IP for a reason: it helps make social structures work better. We have only had the legal concept of IP for a few hundred years now. Are you saying social structures didn't work before then? I think the ancient Egyptians, Mayans, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and many other civilizations too numerous to mention would probably disagree with you on that one.
We have only had the legal concept of IP for a few hundred years now. Are you saying social structures didn't work before then? I think the ancient Egyptians, Mayans, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and many other civilizations too numerous to mention would probably disagree with you on that one.
They also lacked a way to efficiently copy information. IP law, in the form of author's privileges, appeared as early as the 15th century in the west, following the invention of the movable type printing press.
Sounds strawman-ish. "work better" doesn't have to mean mean things didn't work at all before. Not only that, the landscapes were very different. There wasn't a mass market for prerecorded/preprinted media because it was too expensive. I don't think as big of a proportion of the society worked at creating works of art, books, music, movies either. Before a couple centuries ago, most people's employment was in food production, now, food production employs less than 5% of a modern developed society.
This is a knee-jerk response to a real problem. Let me explain what is happening here:
The Associated Press is a not-for-profit organization comprised of hundreds of newspapers and television stations around the world. Members of the cooperative pay to subscribe to news that they would ordinarily not be able to cover because of limited resources. They also contribute their own resources to the wire service. If there is a tornado in some small town in Kansas, the AP will "pick up" the story from the local n
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
Indeed. I'd quote the relevant passage from the AP Stylebook regarding the use of abbreviations, but they seem to have locked it up behind a paid-content wall.
Take THAT, thriving black market for standard news industry reference materials!
a) answered the question b) put interesting facts in c) put relevant link in d) entertain people in the process
Hell, you deserve to be modded up.
This post meets a & d, but misses b and c so should still do ok. But overuse this particular d and it will cease to entertain which just leaves a, and there is no shortage of a's, which means this template, if it remains unfilled will start out funny, but as the funny wears off your moderation will trend towards redundant.;)
There's a point where the ubiquity of an acronym is so much that it doesn't NEED explaining. Do you need me to type that I live in the United States of America (USA)? Or would you get it from the context of what I was saying because it's a common acronym? The AP has been around for so long and has it's name in so many places that I'd think almost all people reading it would know it.
It's still good form to explain an acronym once. Yeah, I got the AP part, AHN [allheadlinenews.com] required a quick Google. Not that Slashdot is going to win any journalism awards (or any other awards for that matter), but pendants have to have something to complain about.
True, but AP means so many other things depending on the context. When I was in highschool, AP meant "Advanced Placement". In the technology namespace, it means "Access Point".
Assuming people on slashdot are going to be familiar with acronyms from the journalism namespace is not really appropriate in my opinion.
Still though, googling for "AP" gives the answer on the first hit, or (god forbid) clicking the link to the article.
Not-for-profit is more of a legal/accounting designation than a vow of poverty, and lawsuits are often to get an court ruling against improper/undesirable behavior, rather than win lots of money.
The Associated Press (AP) is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States
Perhaps this is the reason that I had never heard about "AP"? It's not being used outside your country, but I suppose USA means "The World". I guess you'll wake up sooner or later.
I call it plagiarism (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of this fancy legal term of "hot news", I use another term for what AHN is doing to AP: "plagiarism". According to nolo:
putting your name on someone else's work is still plagiarism and is unethical within artistic, scientific, academic and political communities
I guess the press is not one of those communities. I'm not a big fan of lawsuits: I was sued once by a company that wanted to put me out of business and they almost succeeded. Being right doesn't matter, it's whoever has the deepest pockets.
So in this case, I'd much rather have the community (the readers) shun AHN. It's important for everyone to know what is going on, and let the public make their own choices.
--
FairSoftware.net [fairsoftware.net] -- where geeks are their own boss
Re:I call it plagiarism (Score:5, Insightful)
At what point does this end though? You can't own a fact.
It's currently raining in NY (c) AP 2009?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Now that you've already posted it in public, it's not "hot" news anymore.
Re:I call it plagiarism (Score:5, Interesting)
At what point does this end though? You can't own a fact.
You can sue over them though, as the Big sports associations have:
This one covers "Hot scores" [wired.com].
Back in 1996 this was apparently a controversial thing. Info here about owning facts here [cptech.org] and on the same site here [cptech.org].
And there are still attempts to sue fantasy sports like this one [yahoo.com], but I've never heard of this kind of suit being won by the plaintiffs.
Stranger things have been upheld in court.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It ends at the point you no longer have a competitive advantage from having the "scoop." If I remember the case right, the court correctly noted that the facts can't be copyrighted, and instead carved out a narrow common law right to "hot news" based on a three-factor test I don't remember. There's really not much of a slippery slope here.
!plagiarism (Score:5, Insightful)
Covering the same story is not necessarily plagiarism, copying it verbatim would come directly under copyright but AFAICT that's not the case at issue.
Anyway:
The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it.
It made for a good joke but the AP doesn't seem to be covering this story (I was going to post the link but I can't find one).
Parent
Re:!plagiarism (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they sent themselves a DMCA takedown notice.
Parent
it is not plagiarism (Score:5, Informative)
The press isn't one of those communities because the press doesn't deal in the kinds of concepts you can plagiarize. If AHN copied AP text verbatim, you might say that they plagiarized the writing, but then they would get sued for copyright infringement. But they are merely stating the same fact as a fact stated in an AP news story, and it's a fact that, unlike a scientific experiment, didn't require creativity to observe--it merely required presence.
So, I don't think it's plagiarism.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If they were at a new-event, there is no problem with them creating their own copy (words) and publishing. The entire news industry is based on exactly this.
The problem with AHN is that they are not sending reporters to stories, they are merely copying AP stories.
The Associated Press actually is set up for exactly this purpose (other outlets using their stories); but AP wire-service subscribers are held to certain
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with this is that AHN isn't present. They are merely lifting AP stories.
The problem with AHN is that they are not sending reporters to stories, they are merely copying AP stories.
I see what you did there.
But what if they weren't just getting their facts from AP stories? What if they also got facts from another hot-news source that had information the AP didn't? Shouldn't they be able to combine the facts from two stories in a new narrative to create a more complete story?
It seems other useful actions may run afoul of this, including providing a translation service. Are only the people who read a hot news item's original published languages deserving to be informed?
I read the news to
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to consider what is best for society. If news is unprotected, then it's in everyone's best interest to copy the facts from another source. It's a prisoner's dilemma, and unfortunately greedy companies ALWAYS choose to defect, which means anyone who isn't a sucker will have to either defect as well (leaving us with no source for news whatsoever) or change the rules of the game (which the AP is trying to do).
More power to them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You answered your own question.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'd just like to hear it from the person actually doing it, in order to decide how to respond. Why would someone want to bypass a user's preference to not see signatures, especially since it requires extra work?
There is a script floating around which will automatically insert a sig on slashdot posts. It doesn't have to require ongoing work.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The signature in question appears to be an advertisement for a web site. Advertisers in general try to force people to see their ads. In other words, the signature is spam, and typing it by hand (or script) bypasses the spam filter.
This just in... (Score:4, Funny)
... I'm about to be sued by Associated Press for this hot news item. More at 11
New Internet Rules (Score:3, Insightful)
If it can be taken, copied, borrowed, whatever - it will be. It is not physically or technically possible to prevent this from happening.
That means you are left with civil court remedies, which generally take too long to get anywhere and the penalties may be wholly out of line with the benefits. Basically, you can drive your competitors out of a billion-dollary business and get fined a million dollars. Sounds like a great business plan.
Alternatively, civil court remedies can be wholly out of line the other way, where the benefit to the offender is $1000 and they have to pay a $250,000 fine.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
Sharing is not plagiarism (Score:4, Interesting)
I just thought I should point that out. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own. Sharing does not imply plagiarism. The vast majority of copyright infringement is *not* plagiarism.
One of the foundations of international copyright (and an aspect of it not strongly respected by the United States) is moral rights, including the right of the author to be given credit. I find it ironic that vigorous enforcement of copyright actually creates an incentive for sharers and borrowers to obscure the source or credit of material. This makes their activity harder to detect, and easier for them to defend ("I got this from AP" is kind of a dead giveaway).
If copyright law was closer to actual social practice, this kind of plagiarism would likely be much less common.
Personally, I find clear cases of plagiarism to be utterly dishonest and far worse than sharing.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I think even much of the anti-copyright crowd is still against the idea of attempting to profit off someone else's wo
Re: (Score:2)
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
That seems to be insidious and corrosive though. You better hope that any physician you get had better scruples than that. The same goes to your car mechanic or commercial airline pilot too. You don't want people that should have failed those tests to go on and get employment, which could have devastating consequences.
Message (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Message (Score:5, Funny)
Can we instead quasi-fight for our quasi-right to quasi-party?
Parent
Some more analysis links (Score:5, Insightful)
from Harvad Law (emphasis mine):
But this doesn't really matter anyway, since if you read on in the link I provided, you'll see that federal common law was abolished, so what matters is the specific state law. New York common law establishes strict criteria for the application of the misappropriation doctrine to "hot news" (see National Basketball Ass'n v. Sports Team Analysis & Tracking Systems, Inc. [fmew.com] [warning: site is ugly as sin] for how a recent plaintiff's claim was found to be lacking)... and this seems to meet all of it. It made me chuckle, however, that in that link one of the biggest supporters of the defendant in that case was the AP.
At any rate, I think we need to have either sweeping federal law specifically creating this property, or we need to have no right to "hot news" as quasi-property. The problem with the latter is then there is no incentive to do fact reporting at all, since it would be impossible to recoup the costs of it. The idealist in me says "Boo to treating information as property" but the realist in me says "Yay to having paid reporters".
Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news they want us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news THEY want us to see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No incentive at all? So the fact that most national stories that papers do publish don't generally raise such an issue means nothing to you?
The incentive is there. Beat the other papers to the scoop, forcing the other papers to follow rather than lead.
Re:Some more analysis links (Score:4, Informative)
It's common knowledge in news publishing that in-depth reporting is disappearing. There have been reporter layoffs coast-to-coast, and more papers than ever are simply paying their subscriptions to the AP or Reuters or another news service, then copyediting the AP article (and crediting the AP, of course). This alone is severely limiting the quantity of quality news (especially local news).
However, facts are facts. Since they cannot be copyrighted, this quasi-property status is all that keeps someone from grabbing the facts from the AP Newswire, and reporting on it themselves. This can be done as quickly as someone who is giving attribution to the AP, so the competitive advantage you allow for (which enables the profit) is moot.
If we work from your example, a publisher protects their profit by use of secrecy. This doesn't work for a newswire, whose very business model depends on others' having access to their reporting.
In essence, there are two levels of publication -- once by the AP to news outlets, and once by the news outlets to the public. No "hot news" provision means that the AP's customers (the news outlets) don't need to pay the AP, or even attribute stories to them. Thus, the AP can't pay reporters, and we have even fewer reporters to dig up the facts.
Eventually, all news outlets will be just like the blogosphere, with a dearth of quality reporting, and endless bloglink circle jerks.
I, for one, appreciate the value of the fourth estate.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ha. Newspapers are firing the journalists, because they can get basic news from the AP, or Reuters.
Authors are what sell print media, since that content is not available from the newswires... and they can keep the stories secret until publication.
News reporting is being outsourced to the newswires. Since all the papers get their news from the same sources, timeliness doesn't matter anymore... and the competitive advantage from timeline
I can see it now... (Score:2)
Just imagine...
Massive Asteroid Headed for Earth.
In other news: AP victorious in pre-publication motion to prevent competitors from carrying asteroid story.
Re:I can see it now... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
protecting information: here's the deal (Score:5, Insightful)
We have IP for a reason: it helps make social structures work better. As a society, we make a little deal, and that deal is a different in each of the 3 broad categories of IP protection: copyright & trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
In the copyright area, the deal works like this: the Content Creator gets a limited time right to exclusively control profits, distribution, performance, derivatives and use of the work they create as a proxy for the "property right" they would normally get to claim if they had created a physical thing. In return for this exclusive control, the Content Creator gets both benefits, but also pays a downside. The benefit is they get to profit and control the results of their efforts. The downside is that after that limited time is over, the information always gets released to the society at large. In the long run, society benefits from this deal in two ways: it promotes the creation of works based on information: digital media, software, literature, music, movies, etc. ...in today's world - most everything relating to media, computers, and electronic art. The second, important benefit is that society gets all the information after the limited time is over. It all becomes public domain.
Copyright is good, and we need it. Many have argued and manipulated the system to change the amount of time - but that is another story. Many have argued about how much of what one creates can be controlled, and how - and we have fair use cases that cover exactly that.
So we already have the deal. The deal works (some might argue poorly). I don't see a valid need for another, different deal.
Just because AP runs a large business and spends money doesn't mean they (or anyone) can cut a new deal. In this case, the whole idea of "hot news" is about controlling very specific, small pieces of information: scores, facts, headlines. In my opinion after a very brief read: the balance between what is good of society and what is good for the Content Creator is not met.
Re:protecting information: trade secrets (Score:3, Insightful)
Unpublished news is like unpublished scientific discoveries or product developments. Trade secrets are property of the employer and the employee giving them to anyone else is simple theft and the receiver is at least a receiver of stolen goods, or may be complicit in the theft.
How can a republisher have any advantage? They have to change the words, most likely reducing accuracy. If they can prepare a prettier p
Re:protecting information: here's the deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We have only had the legal concept of IP for a few hundred years now. Are you saying social structures didn't work before then? I think the ancient Egyptians, Mayans, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and many other civilizations too numerous to mention would probably disagree with you on that one.
They also lacked a way to efficiently copy information. IP law, in the form of author's privileges, appeared as early as the 15th century in the west, following the invention of the movable type printing press.
Re:protecting information: here's the deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds strawman-ish. "work better" doesn't have to mean mean things didn't work at all before. Not only that, the landscapes were very different. There wasn't a mass market for prerecorded/preprinted media because it was too expensive. I don't think as big of a proportion of the society worked at creating works of art, books, music, movies either. Before a couple centuries ago, most people's employment was in food production, now, food production employs less than 5% of a modern developed society.
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Come on now (Score:2)
"we won't link to it."
I know you are making a joke, but we shouldn't participate in this bullshit by limiting what we publish [ap.org].
Another sign of the failing news industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Associated Press is a not-for-profit organization comprised of hundreds of newspapers and television stations around the world. Members of the cooperative pay to subscribe to news that they would ordinarily not be able to cover because of limited resources. They also contribute their own resources to the wire service. If there is a tornado in some small town in Kansas, the AP will "pick up" the story from the local n
And I thought the Ninth Circus liked to... (Score:2)
...legislate from the bench.
Seriously, where's the statutory basis for this new property right? Or did they pull all of this stuff directly out of their ass?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe they're like the NN equivalent of an AC on SD or something.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
Re:What the hell is "AP"? (Score:4, Funny)
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
Indeed. I'd quote the relevant passage from the AP Stylebook regarding the use of abbreviations, but they seem to have locked it up behind a paid-content wall.
Take THAT, thriving black market for standard news industry reference materials!
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Re: (Score:2)
The "AP" is the Associated Press. It's probably the largest news gathering organization in the world.
--AC
Re:What the hell is "AP"? (Score:5, Informative)
It's the The Associated Press [wikipedia.org], a wire service [wikipedia.org].
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:What the hell is "AP"? (Score:5, Funny)
Associated Press. (%Insert link to Wikipedia article.%) (%Insert random fact or two about AP.%) (%Insert funny comment to try and get modded up.%)
Ah, thank god for my Slashdot comment template engine.
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Re:What the hell is "AP"? (Score:5, Informative)
I know your being cynical, but if you:
a) answered the question
b) put interesting facts in
c) put relevant link in
d) entertain people in the process
Hell, you deserve to be modded up.
This post meets a & d, but misses b and c so should still do ok. But overuse this particular d and it will cease to entertain which just leaves a, and there is no shortage of a's, which means this template, if it remains unfilled will start out funny, but as the funny wears off your moderation will trend towards redundant. ;)
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Re:What the hell is "AP"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True, but AP means so many other things depending on the context. When I was in highschool, AP meant "Advanced Placement". In the technology namespace, it means "Access Point".
Assuming people on slashdot are going to be familiar with acronyms from the journalism namespace is not really appropriate in my opinion.
Still though, googling for "AP" gives the answer on the first hit, or (god forbid) clicking the link to the article.
Re: (Score:2)
Try this:
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=ap [lmgtfy.com]
But seriously...with the context of the writeup...how in the hell could you not know who the AP is?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Not-for-profit" != "takes in no money".
Not-for-profit is more of a legal/accounting designation than a vow of poverty, and lawsuits are often to get an court ruling against improper/undesirable behavior, rather than win lots of money.
Re:What the hell is "AP"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, let's check the wikipedia article:
The Associated Press (AP) is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States
Perhaps this is the reason that I had never heard about "AP"? It's not being used outside your country, but I suppose USA means "The World". I guess you'll wake up sooner or later.
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