AP Says "Share Your Revenue, Or Face Lawsuits" 293
eldavojohn writes "The Associated Press is starting to feel the bite of the economic recession and said on Monday that they will 'work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.' They are talking about everything from search engines to aggregators that link to news articles and some sites that reproduce the whole news article. The article notes that in Europe legislative action has blocked Google from using news articles from some outlets similar to what was discussed here last week."
If you don't want people looking at it (Score:5, Insightful)
Legislative remedies? Yuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.
"Legal remedies" == we'll sue; easy enough. But what worries most is "legislative remedies". It reeks of "We know you're playing by the rules, but we don't like the rules, so we'll buy off a few senators to get the rules changed."
Re:Wither into irrelevence. (Score:5, Insightful)
The suits just don't understand that traffic is the new black.
No, black is still black. How many sites get tons of hits but no actual profits?
AP may be hurting themselves by doing this, or they may have, you know, actually studied their own buisness and concluded that this is how they will survive. We'll get to see for ourselves. Or not, since if they go under, who is going to report it? AP news?
Robots.txt doesn't work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately this appears to be a money grab and if there was and doubt in my mind about that it was removed when they stated '[we] will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't [license].' Making new laws to maintain your revenue stream is a clear sign to me that you do not have a viable business model and are attempting to make things criminal without a valid reason.
Re:Wither into irrelevence. (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
I think we can discount the second option.
Re:Easy steps (Score:4, Insightful)
1 - Tell someone a story. 2 - Wait till he tells the same story to someone else. 3 - Sue.
A great plan indeed. I can't foresee any way it may fail.
I think it's kind of different. They are gaining revenue for telling the story. And it's not fictional ... and they will be held accountable if they get some facts wrong. And also that's how they make their money.
A more accurate analogy (though still flawed) would be:
1 - Do a lot of footwork to find the facts and tell them to someone to make a tiny sum of money.
2 - Wait till he tells the same story to 10,000 other people with your exact words and little to no attribution to you and he makes a nominal sum of money.
3 - Sue.
Not really a plan, as step 2 requires action on someone else's part. Hey, I don't predict this to fail the way the MPAA/RIAA are being backed by congress and the courts. Legal or legislative action is at the AP's disposal.
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.
If they succeed in this, the only thing that will happen is that some of my news portals will have less actual content and more blogging/editorials/crap (like fashion and celeb news).
Re:Why didn't they adapt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did so many big companies get caught out by the internet? They had the capital, and the human resources to do something, but they just sat there and let it hit them with full force.
It wasn't like it crept up on them overnight!
It is really simple, under the companies' pre-Internet business model they made $X. Under every Internet business model anyone could come up with they would make at best $.0X. They continued using the pre-Internet business model as long as they could, hoping that someone would come up with an Internet business model that would allow them to make $X. It hasn't happened.
These companies that got caught out by the Internet are in businesses that just don't have the potential to make the kind of money they are used to in the Internet age.
These businesses used to have high barriers to entry. The Internet eliminated those barriers to entry.
flawed by design (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wither into irrelevence. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, they should have surveyed the slashdot pundits instead.
Are you really that stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
They do want people looking at, they just want to be paid for their work. You know:
"Information wants to be free, but information purveyors want to be paid."
Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?
AP Killed Printed News (Score:5, Insightful)
The advent of the internet has given us access to many more news sources than we ever had before. Most of us have realized that all of the news papers have the same stories, word for word. This is why they are going out of business. If newspapers, and other news sources, are going to stay in business, they need to provide valuable content. They need to stop relying on the AP for content, we can get that anywhere.
Calling all Slashdot Geniuses (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, as expected, every comment is about how stupid these old media dinosaurs are to repeat the mistakes of the RIAA/MPAA.
Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from? And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?
I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
Re:Aggregator Aggro (Score:3, Insightful)
I would point out that Slashdot is an Aggregator with comment posting. It generates no actual news stories itself.
Re:Robots.txt doesn't work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but the big sites they're going after like Google and Yahoo will respect robots.txt. (If they don't, now that would be a story.)
Google isn't stealing their articles. They are linking to their articles, with maybe a snippet quoted which falls under fair use.
The trouble is that the AP wants it both ways. They don't want to exclude themselves from Google's traditional search results. And yet, they want to block Google from compiling search results about recent news into a single, useful page.
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:2, Insightful)
NO! You get off my lawn! Damn whippersnappers and their mobile devices with aggregated digital news.
Back in my day if we wanted the news we had to walk to the newsstand, uphill both ways, and pay a hard earned nickel for it!
Almost sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy steps (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Google removes all newspapers with AP content from its indexing
3) Newspapers, with falling print sales and no Google presence, go out of business
4) No one left to buy AP stories
5) ???
6) Profit!
Re:SO no RSS feeds then? (Score:3, Insightful)
It works more like this:
Someone creates some content for a website. Their revenue is based on the number of people visiting the site.
Someone else comes along and aggregates multiple websites. Instead of people visiting the original site, they start to visit the aggregator because it's more convenient. The aggregator gets the views and the advertising money.
The content creators lose out, even though they create the content.
The argument from the aggregator site is that it pushes viewers to sites that they would never normally visit. E.g., a person in Florida may never read an Oklahoma newspaper unless there was a link somewhere on an aggregator.
Sometimes it balances out, but more and more, it's in favor of the aggregator.
I think eventually content will be separated from the presentation. Companies like the AP, like the local Herald, will switch from providing a newspaper or website into providing a standard feed, and charging based on that feed. This is very similar to how other media is shopped around.
There's a danger in that news will also become indistinguishable from entertainment (it's almost there already), but that may be the only way the newspapers can survive.
Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses (Score:1, Insightful)
Aggregation (like search) has value on its own. It makes content useful. Their ability to sustain a business on content is their own problem, perhaps we've reached a point where their content is not compelling enough to be a viable business.
This does not mean they are owed some piece of aggregation revenue. I'm mostly speaking of sites like google news, where you get a smallish snippet and a link to the source.
No industry has the right to exist, it has to prove its value. Right now, newspapers just aren't doing so.
Re:Are you really that stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't make him stupid. He pointed out something very obvious - once information is out there, you have to exert a lot of effort to bottle it back up. In the old days, it was relatively easy to find out who was filching your information - now it can be hard to find out even what country someone is in, let alone who they are.
Does this mean the end for the AP? Maybe. Does this mean the end of news? I doubt it. Look at NPR and the BBC, for example. While relying on government or non-profits for news may bring its own issues, I seriously doubt that the information will cease to be generated.
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:5, Insightful)
However to asking money from sites that merely link to the articles? That seems over the top and counter-productive. After all that brings traffic to the site which hosts the article. Linking itself must be free speech, and using the headline and 1-2 sentences in order to describe the link must be fair use.
One goal of The A.P. and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are "the original source or the most authoritative source," not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.
That goal is ok, but they have no right to prevent a search engine from giving the user the site they are most likely looking for. If that's a site discussing the news, rather than the site presenting the news, they can address this by making their own sites more attractive. In any case - they get a link out of it.
Other than that: if you really don't want to be indexed (and not just pretend you don't because you want to get money from the search engines) then just use robots.txt.
Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
I was agreeing with you up until this point.
Most people's problems with the MPAA has been with their willingness to fight technology rather than embrace it, often by using the laws they have paid to have put in place. They strive to not even try new methods of movie delivery, such as releasing a film at the same time on PPV as in theaters, easy non-DRM encumbered downloads for a less than a rental, etc. These other methods might fail, but the MPAA (or the studios that make it up) haven't even really experimented in these areas.
I know you didn't bring it up, but the RIAA is another example. Not only do you have the abusive legal stuff, but you have the fact that they are really just a layer of lawyers, managers and distributors that are no longer as crucial to their industry as they once were. They have done more to try releasing their content in new ways, but they still only do it begrudgingly and so they wind up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the whole fact that for all these years, the only way to legally purchase music from a lot of popular artists was to buy into the whole iTunes+DRM bullshit. They only wanted to shift their business model if it would still give all the useless people the same fat paychecks as they had always gotten, without paying the actual content creators a nickel more.
Re:Are you really that stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?
From somebody else who knows how to purvey information and still make a buck? Just a hunch.
To hell with the AP if they're going to go the route of the RIAA.
Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a strawman. No one's advocating the practice of copying and pasting entire AP articles. Read the fscking article (or at least the summary) -- the AP is talking about demanding fees for Web sites who link to their stories or copy and paste excerpts with links to the full stories.
Traditional journalists look down upon bloggers, but sometimes the only difference is that one group uses the Associated Press Stylebook and the other doesn't. I think you'll discover that if "traditional" newspapers go away, communities will step in to fill the void.
Re:Are you really that stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... I think it's a little more than that. At least, they're specifically picking on Google in the summary's synopsis of the article. And why?
When I look at Google News, I see a page of links, the titles of which are almost entirely just headlines. The few that aren't just headlines include only a sentence or two from the article. How is this not fair use? And how is the AP entitled to any compensation for this? If you truly want to know more, you'll click on a link and, if it's an AP story, be sent to an AP website where you will get both the full article and the AP's ads.
For site's which don't play nice, ripping whole articles or outright plagiarism, then go ahead, bring down the hammer. But that's not a new problem. This, on the other hand, sounds an awful lot like the AP going for a money grab while waving a big lawyer stick. And what's worse is that they might succeed because the courts have time and again shown questionable judgment when it comes to cases involving linking and fair use.
Re:Why didn't they adapt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:4, Insightful)
more blogging/editorials/crap (like fashion and celeb news).
Like Newsweek? I took these [newsweek.com] examples [newsweek.com] from the website [newsweek.com] but the print editions are worse - more than half the mag is dedicated to ads and pop culture BS. If they don't want the internet to eat their lunch then they should print a magazine worth reading. Sure, Newsweek isn't exactly the New Yorker or Foreign Policy magazine, but it's really went downhill from being the respectable news rag I read as a kid.
Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses (Score:2, Insightful)
Why, blog journalists, of course. Am I joking or am I serious? What would be the result of a shift of this nature? Discuss...
This was a mistake on jgalun's part, underestimating the massive blogger population who are prepared, on a moment's notice, to fly all over the planet to get stories and report on them to the satisfaction of the trapped-in-the-90s pop culture junkies that read their blogs. Massive amounts of bloggers do this. All the time. And they never ever ever ever just sit on their asses, slurp down news from the AP or other reporting companies, and just bitch and whine about them. Never. Nuh-uh.
Because as we all know, there's an equal number of bloggers willing to sit in on senate hearings about the minutiae of budget reform and can fly out to war zones to get FIRST-HAND information on the injustices carried out by the armed forces on all sides as there are bloggers willing to do HARD HITTING REPORTING on some obscure manga artist, some cartoon series from the 80s and 90s that died with good reason, or zomg flying out to Comic-Con to booze and schmooze with people who think the exact same thing they do.
"Yesterday some crazy guy off in East Korea or wherever launched a missile. But I've got a bunch of new figurines from my favorite anime!!!1! They're the same as the old ones I had, just different sizes!"
Welcome to the future of hard-hitting reporting.
Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is not that they are repeating the RIAA/MPAA approach. The problem is that they did exactly the opposite. Instead of protecting their content, they are giving it away. Even the AP: I have a free app on my iPhone from the AP that gives me the AP news feed. Newspapers wanted to get ahead of the digital revolution, so they put their product on-line. Some tried to charge for it, but there were enough who put it up for free that the for-charge plans failed. So they are stuck trying to make it work economically with on-line advertising.
The future of newspapers is dim. Soon, the only ones "reporting" news will be companies that are operating in other media: CNN, Fox etc. Ancillary, low-profit news media such as print and the Web will exist only as add-ons to the profit-making operations to "build the brand." Here in Hartford, for example, the sole daily newspaper, the Hartford Courant, recently announced that its newsroom operations were being combined with that of the co-owned Channel 61 station -- with the TV news director becoming the publisher of the newspaper. That's the model we're heading toward.
Re:Why can't we all get along? (Score:2, Insightful)
Given these two historical points -- as well as the tendency towards zero marginal cost for reproduction and distribution of digital content, I personally don't think micropayments make sense.
Re:Are you really that stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is a bit more complex, I think:
1) That AP article is not just on nytimes.com, but a lot of other news sites also aggregated by Google.
2) AP, nor those who syndicate it, have control over how or where their content is placed on Google. They only get to say "here is my newsfeed, have fun".
3) Because of #2, if you have 40 newspapers who bought an AP article but only nytimes gets listed on the "front page" of google news, the other newspapers aren't getting any ROI on their purchase.
4) Ponies.
Sure, in the short-run they did. But the problem with AP is they too are basically a twisted form of a news-aggregates. They aggregate news stories and sell it to a hundred newspapers who print said stories and generate revenue by selling ads next to the story. Nowdays, those newspapers are aggregated by Google, who aggregates the newspapers in such a way that only a few of the newspapers displaying that article get any traffic in which to sell ads to.
In other words, maybe AP should cut the middle man and just sell to Google.
Well, maybe they should! (Score:4, Insightful)
I like to visit "real" newspaper sites that have good discussion systems. Almost all of the local newspapers in Seattle have horrible comment systems that are tucked a way in such a fashion that only real nutcases seem to inhabit them.
Worse, they all seem to use digg-style "up/down" moderation. "Up/Down" moderation is horrible for anything outside product reviews. It creates a feedback loop where those that go with the group think get rewarded with "+55" and those who go against get shunned at "-11" with no way to get out of the hole.
Slashdot may not be perfect, but after using dozens if not hundreds of other discussion systems, they do have pretty much the best out there. DailyKos is close second, but only because a limited set of users can down-rate a comment and even those users can only dish out a couple down-rates a day. Anything that grants regular users the ability to make an unlimited number of down-rates will quickly turn into a cesspool of wackos.
So yeah, newspaper sites could learn a thing or two by ripping some of what slashdot does right. Slashdot could do the same and finally add a rich text editor to the comments so I can finally highlight a string of words and make it a link...but that is a different story :-)
Re:Are you really that stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
The BBC is wholly independent of and separate from the British tax system
All about the double dip (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not that the newspapers don't want Google linking to their website. They want the ad revenue of course. They just want Google to pay for the privilege of linking to their website as well. Think of ISPs who want you to pay for an Internet connection and then want websites to pay for a premium connection to your system.
This is probably why AP is going about it, rather than an individual newspaper. If an individual newspaper complains to Google, Google will simply remove them from being listed. The newspaper loses to their rivals and no one gets the double dip. If legislation required Google to link to the newspapers and pay a small fee every time someone clicked on a link, I think AP would be happy. If Google was not required to link to the newspapers, it probably would just link to the websites of a country which didn't have this legislation. It's pretty much asking Google to subsidize the newspaper industry. I'm not a supporter of this.
Re:AP Is Pricing Itself Out Of the Blog Market (Score:4, Insightful)
They're giving you the price it costs to pay the human cost (salaries, benefits, travel costs) of reporting the news you say you want to give your readers. It's not cheap.
It is cheap when they're selling the exact same information to every newspaper on the planet...
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:2, Insightful)
I completely agree. I have gotten into the habit of counting the number of articles in my local paper written by local reporters, it averages out to about 5. All the other articles are from the AP wire, and I had gotten that news on the internet the day before.
I would much rather have my local paper ditch the wire services completely and fill that space with nothing but local/regional news. Even if that means they only deliver the paper 4 days a week.
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I would suggest expanding your news gathering. BBC, NPR, CNN and NYT all have excellent pieces of investigative journalism. Is everything on their sites or in their papers solid, investigative journalism? Of course not. But to say "virtually everything is fluff news" betrays more your lack of reading than a lack of good journalism.
Re:If you don't want people looking at it (Score:2, Insightful)
While I loathe your reflex to call for a 'new law' (ugh) to protect the industry, the problem you point out is a simple economic one: It used to be that information *distribution* was naturally scarce, so newspapers could cover the costs of investigative work by charging for information distribution. In the Internet era, the cost of the actual distribution of information will virtually approach zero. But it still costs the same to do the legwork.
Basically: *distribution* has little value, but *investigation* still does, and always will have value. Nobody *should* be making more lots of money for distributing information when technology allows it to cost so little - artificially protecting that would just be protectionist welfare and damaging to everyone.
You are suggesting that nobody would be able to pay investigators if they couldn't charge for distribution. This simply isn't true. Since investigation has value, people won't mind paying to obtain its results in one way or another; if investigators disappeared, people would freak out, and a gap in the market would appear. This could be solved in many ways - for example, a company like Google could make use of advertising to subsidize investigators.
Don't be so scared that we're going to run out of news. It will naturally have value, because people will naturally demand it. No need to call government to help. Governments are absolutely the last people you want to trust with controlling impartial investigation!