Court Upholds AP "Quasi-Property" Rights On Hot News 169
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."
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.
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?
!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).
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:Some more analysis links (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:OT: your signature (Score:3, Insightful)
You answered your own question.
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 presentation, then they've added value.
Re:it is not plagiarism (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 today, oh boy!
"Sir, I represent the Associated Press. I have a court order demanding an immediate halt to this unauthorized repackaging of our hot news item."
Another sign of the failing news industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:protecting information: here's the deal (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.
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.