icopyright.net Here's what the Associated Press currently charges bloggers to quote their stories online. Prices start at $12.50 for five words. Um, what happened to fair use? Stealing a page from Recording Industry Association of America's playbook (an act that does not violate copyright -- yet), the Associated Press apparently is trying to make a business model out of threatening to sue its market. Most recently, the target was the Drudge Retort -- a liberal community site that parodies Matt Drudge's famous conservative muckraking site. On June 12 Rogers Cadenhead (who runs the Drudge Retort as a hobby) announced that AP had filed six Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests "demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment." Elaborating on this legal action, Cadenhead wrote, "The 8,500 users of the [Drudge Retort] contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the Web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline." OK, I've got to ask: What is the point of threatening legal action against online publishers who quote as little as 33 words from a news story? Seems to me that could set ...
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icopyright.net Here's what the Associated Press currently charges bloggers to quote their stories online. Prices start at $12.50 for five words. Um, what happened to fair use? Stealing a page from Recording Industry Association of America's playbook (an act that does not violate copyright -- yet), the Associated Press apparently is trying to make a business model out of threatening to sue its market. Most recently, the target was the Drudge Retort -- a liberal community site that parodies Matt Drudge's famous conservative muckraking site. On June 12 Rogers Cadenhead (who runs the Drudge Retort as a hobby) announced that AP had filed six Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests "demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment." Elaborating on this legal action, Cadenhead wrote, "The 8,500 users of the [Drudge Retort] contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the Web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline." OK, I've got to ask: What is the point of threatening legal action against online publishers who quote as little as 33 words from a news story? Seems to me that could set ...