Squaring the Culture

The Associated Press attempted over the weekend to stop bloggers from quoting AP stories without permission. The target of their first barrage was a leftward-leaning lampoon of Matt Drudge’s internet staple, called “the Drudge Retort.” They’ve been showered with cease-and-desist orders for quoting AP stories briefly, citing 7 stories that each quote between 25 and 80 words from AP stories.

The blogworld barfed, so they dropped back 15 yards and got the Marketing Department involved. Yesterday, they published a schedule of charges for quoting their material. It will cost me $12.50 to quote from 5 to 25 words of an AP story.

Charge schedule from AP web usage access site, showing how much AP words are worth. Notice the somewhat embarrassing “iCopyright” logo at top right, the “i” being a fair use imitation of some obscure company’s logo idea (smirk).

Blogworld has predictably gone berserk. Michelle Malkin pulled together some pretty funny stuff yesterday to slap the AP around a little. She notes how frequently the AP has quoted her blog without permission, so she applies their criteria and claims they owe her a few hundred grand for a couple of stories. Nyuk nyuk. She also has mock-up A La Carte schedules from AP ($.25 for “a”, “and,” and “the,” etc.) and a few other snark rockets from blog sites. Patterico took a more serious tone, observing that the AP recently quoted twice as much from his blog as Drudge Retort quoted from their story, and that he wouldn’t charge them for fair use. He’s going to continue to quote AP stories in a manner that conforms to fair use law. Brave soul. Patterico is a lawyer, and has quite a bit of blog muscle.

Me? I may do the same, but I’m considering grass-roots calls to simply boycott the AP.

Mememorandum shows a little BlogWorld agitation over the AP’s money-grubbing.

I’m sure they think it’s like the record industry trying to charge for downloaded songs, but it’s not. “Fair use” has been a staple of copyright law for quite a while (even for songs — you can use a clip from a song in another work if the clip is brief, your use of it transforms it, and your own work does not affect the profits of the other work’s owner). From this useful discussion of fair use law from Stanford University, here are the fair use guidelines:

• If your use of the quoted material adds value to it or transforms it into a different message, you’re probably entitled to fair use.
• If the nature of the copyrighted work is factual, you’re more likely to be entitled to use portions of it in your work, because the dissemination of facts benefits the public.
• The less of the original work you use, the more likely that you’re using it fairly.
• It’s more likely to be fair use if your use of the original work does not deprive the owner of income.

Notice that these are guidelines, not rules. Courts handle these case-by-case, and make subjective judgments about the situations. Still, it’s pretty clear that a blog quoting a small segment of an AP story constitutes fair use, so long as:

• We quote small segments, not entire articles;
• We’re quoting news reports;
• We’re adding commentary;
• We link to their site, which increases circulation and demand for their story, enhancing their profitability.

By the way, if the AP thinks I’m a candidate for a pay subscription to their news service, and that my use of quotes from yahoo.com deprives them of income from my subscription, they’re living on a capitalist fatcat fantasy farm. Dream on, suckers. My site makes no money, I’m not about to pay much to enhance it. If I get to the point where it’s important for me to know the news as soon as possible after it happens and respond to it quickly, then I’ll subscribe — even if I can get their story for free from yahoo.com.

I think they can’t be serious about charging for use; I think they’re angling to get some structure into how BlogWorld uses their stuff. We’ll see, and soon.