Tuesday, June 17, 2008

AP Makes Us An Offer We Can't Refuse




The AP’s disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the
alternative it’s now offering to being served with takedown notices involves
paying an up-front sum for excerpting online articles — as few as five
words.


A meeting between the Associated Press’ Vice President for
Strategic Planning Jim Kennedy and Robert Cox, who heads the Media Bloggers
Association, is now planned for Thursday of this week. The subject at hand is
the AP’s attempt to find a new way of sharing AP content, which now involves a
fee per excerpt based on its word length.


On the heels of a blogosphere revolt last week because of its harsh
actions against social news site The Drudge Retort, the AP regrouped over the
weekend to take a less litigative — but more bureaucratic — approach to dealing
with those who wish to quote its material.


Where the group had previously invoked the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act and sent cease-and-desist orders to at least one blogger, seeking
the removal of excerpted content (in some cases as few as 17 words in length),
now the press service has attached an “Excerpt for Web Use” charge for passages
as short as five words in length.


The pricing scale for excerpting AP content begins at $12.50 for
5-25 words and goes as high as $100 for 251 words and up. Nonprofit
organizations and educational institutions enjoy a discounted rate.


As LGF commenter Mich-again says,

No problem. I'll just take their story and correct the grammar errors, and delete all the biased opinions posing as facts. They won't even recognize the story.

6 comments:

Epaminondas said...

Guess what...they're banned

Pastorius said...

Oh yes, they are. They are banned. They will be obsolete, if that's what they want.

If fact, if they want to go to war, then the War is over, if they want it.

Hah.

Always On Watch said...

My nickname is "The Grammar Police."

Pastorius said...

AP's name is

Associated (with Terrorists) Press

nanc said...

fyi - mine was one of the seven posts pulled at the retort (rogers cadenhead) and now we may post only 400 characters for ANY news media! guess they're going to force us to rewrite their articles with attribution - i can do that, but i won't use ap until this is settled!

Pastorius said...

Nanc,
They certainly can not do anything about it, if you rewrite their articles WITHOUT attribution.

I would suggest doing something like this,

'There's an article in the news today. I'm not sure about the source, but it says something about such and such ...

Go to Google, if you want more."

For my part, I will simply refer to AP as a "not-to-be-named" news distributor, or something like that.