[A2k] Washington Post: Behind The A.P.'s Plan To Become The Web's News Cop

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040603207_pf.html

Behind The A.P.'s Plan To Become The Web's News Cop

Erick Schonfeld
TechCrunch.com
Monday, April 6, 2009; 3:31 PM

With its news syndication business under direct attack by the growing
abundance of other news sources on the Internet, the Associated Press
announced today that it will begin to police the Web and "develop a
system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being
legally used." The A.P., it appears, wants to become the RIAA of the
flailing newspaper industry?ferreting out information pirates and
threatening lawsuits if they don't turn over some of their Google gold.

The A.P. has a broad view of what constitutes its content. It is not
just entire articles copied wholesale by spam blogs. The A.P. has
problems with the unauthorized use of its headlines, even when they
include links. Many of its policies ignore the concept of fair use.
And even when it has cause to go after copyright violators, it
sometimes relies on antiquated and tortuous legal theories. The A.P.
is so backwards in its thinking that we've banned links to all of its
stories on TechCrunch.

Now it wants to go after unauthorized use if its news articles across
the Web. Forget for a moment that its notion of what constitutes
unauthorized use may not hold up in a court of law. The A.P. is going
directly after the search engines and news aggregators which often
point traffic away from A.P. sources directly at the supposed
infringers.

So how exactly does the A.P. plan on policing the Internet? Here I
must rely on informed speculation, but I think I have a pretty good
idea. The A.P. already monitors the Web for any partial or whole re-
use of its articles and photos through a partnership with Attributor,
a startup that has indexed the Web and can find any content for which
it has a digital fingerprint. After identifying the worst offenders
through Attributor, the A.P. could simply present that list to Google
or any other site pointing to those offending sites and demand action.
This action could be anything from redirecting links to A.P.-
sanctioned sites to demanding a portion of the offending sites'
AdSense or other advertising revenues if they happen to be a customer.

Would Google comply with such requests? If doing so gets the A.P. and
Rupert Murdoch off its back, and it believes there is a good chance
that copyright infringement is taking place, it very well might. The
real troubling aspect here is that this determination would not be
made by a courts, but rather placed into the hands of Google and the
A.P. The A.P, for one, has already proven that it cannot be trusted to
distinguish between fair use and infringement on its own behalf. And
Google's policy when it comes to claims of copyright infringement is
to take down the offending content and ask questions later.


------------------------------------------------------------


Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org


Tel: +41 22 791 6727
Mobile: +41 76 508 0997