Inside the AP's Plan To Security-Wrap Its News Content 138
suraj.sun writes with an excerpt from this story at Ars Technica that the "Associated Press, reeling from the newspaper apocalypse, has a new plan to 'wrap' and 'protect' its content though a 'digital permissions framework.' The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to 'apply protective format to news.' The AP's news registry will 'tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,' and it will provide a 'platform for protect, point, and pay.' That's a lot of 'p'-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news — 'enforcement,' in AP-speak."
does this also mean they are gonna go back (Score:3, Interesting)
to being real journalists? are they just trying to protect the nonsense half-ass poorly written claptrap they currently pawn off as news?
Re:Your services are no longer needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Yea right after we get the paperless office.
Hey I am all for blogging and the idea of the citizen reporter but they supplement not replace professionals.
Of course at least on TV I don't think the professionals are what they used to be but then I might just being an old fuddy duddy and seeing the past in rose colored glasses.
As a former newspaper IT guy... (Score:4, Interesting)
AP's wire stories used to be delivered using arcane satellite-to-modem-to-serial solutions that functioned pretty faithfully unless you got snow/ice on your satellite dish on the roof.
Then the AP switched to a web-based delivery method which was a hardware improvement, but a Sarbanes-Oxley nightmare along with website/Internet outage issues and other new hijinks that were all new issues that made this web-based solution worse than the arcane solution it replaced.
Now they've gone further down the dark path with DRM.... just sounds like more fun for newspaper IT guys.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:fp (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be pasting this wire service shit into my so-called "journal entries", as per usual. I can always automate OCR off of the screen. So what if hyperlinks aren't preserved? Context and reference can be established by the 1 or 2 blokes who are already actually verifying that stuff.
I'm sure that this won't stop Wired News, Cryptogon.com, Cannon Fire or any of the guys like whatreallyhappened.com - who dump a bit of everything undercovered into the mix. But it will slow them - a bit.
Instead of this crappy pseudo-technology, which has been shown to be ineffective in every other application, AP could profitably syndicate with Google, and share ad revenues. AP==content Google==delivery+revenue engine.
Instead, they want to kill the bloggers - not because of business models. Because they no longer gatekeep the message or manage how it is spun.
Great oligarchs own the megaconglomerates behind corporate news. That's not wild-eyed tinfoil hatted craziness, but simple facts from earnings reports. With incipient dictatorship in everywhere from Western Europe, the US, Iran and Israel, and a coming fiscal "crisis" designed to unify world reserve currency, there's a greater need than ever for these "overlords" - and the banks that loaned them their capital - to turn the Weird Wild Web into your 1984 telescreen.
So, they'll try. Soon, it won't be worth switching on the router - cause you'll be tracked like a migratory bird. In the meantime, we'll all still link and scrape. We'll still point out EXACTLY [globalresearch.ca] what they [blogspot.com] are up to [blogspot.com].
I actually want something like this -- but for PII (Score:4, Interesting)
I know it sounds nuts, but I actually want a system like this for personally identifiable information (PII).
If a business has my PII in their records, I want them to tag it with meta-data on how it was collected and what rights *they* have to use/share it. It's not any more enforceable than any other DRM scheme, but it would help to implement privacy policies, which is good for the consumer. And it would help to limit secondary uses of PII which is also good for the businesses that make money by collecting PII.
I'm wanting meta-data with terms like "this was collected with NO permission to re-distribute", or "this was collected with a promise to delete after 6 months", etc.
great. (Score:2, Interesting)
something like scribd? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I thought Slashdot was filled with geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
God forbid they make money of something they produced.
AP unbiased? (Score:2, Interesting)
Written by AP no doubt. Someone should show this to their editors, AP has been carrying Republican water [mediamatters.org] for years.
Robot Scrapers (Score:4, Interesting)
This has zilch to do with enforcement because the proposal contains no technical method of enforcement.
Not technical, no. Their big enforcement plan is...lawyers!
See, the AP is convinced that its Public Enemy Number 1 is robot scrapers. You know them...cruddy sites that blindly copy the HTML from legitimate news sites and archive them, in the hopes that someday, when the stories have long since fallen off the CNN.com and nytimes.com headline pages, someone from a search engine will stumble across the story and click on an add, thereby generating revenue. Like the ones that copy Wikipedia articles and add advertisements.
The plan is to basically embed some sort of web bug in the HTML, which will help AP identify the scrapers, which will allow them to file an honest lawsuit, in which the infringing scraper will show up in court, hat in hand, and beg forgiveness.
This is sad for several reasons.
1. The AP believes that these scrapers are actually a serious threat to the AP's revenue stream.
2. The AP believes that the people who run these scrapers won't be able to strip their tracking bugs out
3. The AP believes that it'll be able to find and sue the operators and make them stop, instead of just driving them into jurisdictions that don't care.
4. The AP is confusing these scrapers with legitimate aggregators, like Google News, and legitimate bloggers, and thus making lots of enemies
They'll send out different versions of the text. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's called a canary trap [wikipedia.org]. Post even a snippet to your favorite BBS or blog and you're busted.
Re:Robot Scrapers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wishful Thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
I read your comment as implicitly granting that there is no meaningful partisan divide regarding IP law.
Terms like "minority" and "a lot" are not going to serve us well. The generalizations you made are also not helpful, imho. Nearly all federal legislators support laws like the DMCA. I am also of a "minority" view in the Democratic party.
Regarding your essay, I must say that I find your hostility towards "liberals" disconcerting. I am a small business owner and a "liberal", if you feel you must use that term; specifically, I believe in shared responsibility for the well-being of society, and the government fulfillment of the general welfare clause. And no, I don't have horns, a shrine to Karl Marx, or connections to Hollywood of any kind.
Just as an example: I, and many others, think that employer-based health care has been a disaster for small business; I would much rather pay individual income tax into a government trust fund (which have an excellent track record, in spite of the misinformation) and have a healthy society along with freeing up giant bags of money for other purposes. I really can't see how that would make a liberal anti-small-business. It is time for the Republican party's claim on small business to end. The Chamber doesn't speak for me.
I have never even considered going after a "conservative" industry, as I don't even know what that would be. If you agree with your fellow Republicans on lower taxation, but support new taxes when they would benefit your party, then "inconsistent" would be the polite way to describe your position. And those who "see things more [your] way" have accepted a flawed thesis from you. To think that Democrats oppose IP reform because of Hollywood fundraising is convoluted, as there is much simpler explanation: Both parties respond to lobbying from the IP cartels (a much broader coalition than merely Hollywood), and the payment is direct. Both parties would be punished equally for trying to reform IP law.
Btw, the last effort to reform the DMCA was introduced by a Democrat in the 109th, and acquired a Republican co-sponsor in the 110th: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_USE_Act [wikipedia.org]
There are more important things than partisan points. I can see that this war against liberals is kind of your raison d'etre, but I really think that your rhetorical skills could better be applied somewhere else.
Not a flame, and btw, I wish you the best of luck in moderating your party's attitude towards unions.