What’s black and white and read all over?
Not aggregated content derived from the Associated Press, which is threatening to take legal action against anyone and any business that links or copies unsubscribed AP content. The AP is a news agency and cooperative owned by newspapers that creates and picks up content to distribute to newspapers that pay an annual fee.
If the AP begins pursuing legal action against aggregators, like Google and the Drudge Report, for puLitzenbergerblishing links to AP content via RSS feeds, students like Hannah Litzenberger could have to catch up on their morning news elsewhere online. And according to an AP press release Monday, it plans to.
That is, if she feels up to clicking around various local and national news Web sites that pay an annual rate to republish AP content online and in print.
The AP stated in the press release aggregators — and even bloggers — that distribute or reprint AP content without properly licensing it will be subject to “legal and legislative action.”
That means businesses like Google could be hit with lawsuits from AP defenders if they choose to disregard its “initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online,” the press release stated.
“I get all of my online news from RSS feeds,” Litzenberger, a senior in natural resources, said. “My Netvibes page lets me quickly look over so many new sources without having to go to individual sites. I can look at the headlines for New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, WhiteHouse.gov and other sources.”
Netvibes is a site that collects feed from blogs and news sites, among other services, and could be used to import Google News feed.
The industry-wide initiative to protect news content from being distributed without either advertising revenue generated to the parent Web site or paying for content is a reaction to the journalism industry’s poor business performance in recent years.
An annual report on American media, released by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, reported a 23 percent drop in advertising revenues in the last two years. One out of every five journalists who worked for the newspaper industry in 2001 is gone, the report stated.
And it’s only going to get worse.
Although news-related Internet traffic has increased by 19 percent since 2007, Robert Kochersberger, an associate professor in English, said the AP, like any successful business, will want to keep profits as high as possible.
“If the AP perceives that it is somehow losing income potential, then it will become a bigger issue now than it did 10 years ago when the industry was still flushed with money,” he said, adding that the financial crises facing the industry are “serious, they’re big problems. If you have a chance to make money, you want to make as much money as you can.”
But whether the AP will win suits against those who publish or link to its content without paying is not certain. The Supreme Court has passed few laws that govern all Internet use, and even fewer that can apply to copyright infringement and fair use policies.
“There’s been a battle to determine ownership of content for a long time,” he said. “It’s going to be a completely different understanding of who owns what and how profit it made from information.”
Kochersberger said the AP’s initiative raises the issue of who retains the copyright on information that has been passed on, copied and linked to on the Internet. The same questions were raised when, in an unprecedented act of defining copyright on social networking sites, Facebook changed its Terms of Service to say that the company owned all of its users’ information, photos and notes — even if users deleted the information and their accounts.
“Some people have said that, because of technology, copyright protection is doomed, that people are not going to be able to have protection for their work because there are so many varied and so many fast ways of sending out content,” he said. “Sources are hard to trace. A story could go from one site to another site to another site, and by the time the story is six sites removed form the AP, who owns it?”
While the AP is arguing its content is protected under copyright laws, Kochersberger said aggregators are claiming their actions are covered by the Fair Use Doctrine, which allows individuals or companies to use a copyrighted material “when some conditions are met.”
“If they take a link, is that the same thing as taking the entire story? The question is, where is the story — it’s in cyberspace somewhere,” he said. “If the use is for an education purpose, fair use could apply. If it is commercial, fair use could apply. If the work itself is factional rather than fictional, fair use is going to apply.”
Kochersberger said copyright laws exist to protect the copyright owners from people and businesses who are promoting the work as their own or who are keeping copyright owners from profiting off their work.
And in the case of aggregators versus the AP, nothing is black and white except the content itself.
“It’s going to be a real interesting case,” he said. “AP needs to be careful with what it asks for because it might get it. This could end up hurting the AP because a lot of the aggregators are really just taking links and then returning the readers right back to the original sources. In a way, this raises an issue that is going to be bigger than copyright or AP by themselves.”
Some sites that feed from AP headlines, like TechCrunch, have already blocked the service. Litzberger said Google and other aggregators are resourceful enough to find alternative headlines if they refuse to bargain with the AP.
“It’s fair to charge Google or other AP content users, but I would imagine Google would just find news content elsewhere,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like the AP has a strong hold on the news media like it used to since there is some much news information available on the Internet. The availability of free news, content, and information on the Internet makes all this stuff so tricky.”
