Misguided Legal Theories? Come on, AP.

by Patrick Kabat | April 11, 2009 | KLAMP | 1 Comment

We ought to pay close attention to the unfolding imbroglio over proprietary news content, spearheaded by the AP’s recent initiative to rein in the reproduction of AP-produced content in search engines and the blogosphere.

Though this unfolds chiefly against the backdrop of an industry in crisis, the longstanding implications may be most interesting from an institutional decision-making point of view.  The licensing and litigation standards produced by the AP will have a profound effect on how news is circulated online.  Much like the Google Books settlement, licensing agreements worked out between aggregators and the AP will have a profound impact on the way we get news, and it will be extremely interesting to see how the AP decides to push back on what it calls the “misguided legal theories” which guide search engines and bloggers in quoting AP stories.

And how might the AP’s interests diverge from those of the newspapers which are simultaneously its clients, contributors, and owners?   In this initiative, the AP appears essentially to be speaking for the newspaper industry, and may singlehandedly be able to reshape norms on content-appropriation online from the perspective of its own bottom line.  If the AP is successful in tapping into profits from Google and others, will more fundamental questions about how we should pay for news be postponed, to the detriment of media actors who have yet to emerge as heavyweight players?

A spot-fix for newspapers, especially through a complicated entity like the AP, may not be an optimal fix for the media ecology.

Comments