[Infowarrior] - AP: tech coming to stop "wholesale theft" on 'Net

[Richard Forno]

AP: tech coming to stop "wholesale theft" on 'Net

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/ap-tech-coming-to-stop-wholesale-theft-on-net.ars
It looks like the Associated Press is getting pretty close to  
deploying that 'anti-misappropriation' technology the news agency has  
been talking about. Ars got an AP editor to give us some details.
By Matthew Lasar | Last updated June 1, 2009 9:35 PM CT

Ever since the Associated Press warned in April that it is going to  
take steps against "misappropriation" of its content, Ars has been  
wondering what exactly those efforts will entail. After all, the press  
release wasn't exactly chock full of details; it simply disclosed that  
the AP will "develop a system to track content distributed online to  
determine if it is being legally used."

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work  
under misguided legal theories," AP Chairman Dean Singleton declared  
around the same time. The statement followed last year's AP Digital  
Millennium Copyright Act takedown warnings against the Drudge Retort  
for posting AP content, which called some posts a "'hot news'  
misappropriation."

The guidelines cometh

So what exactly is AP going to do? While attending a Knight Center for  
Specialized Journalism conference, we put the question to AP news  
editor Ted Bridis, who spoke to the gathering of tech-savvy  
journalists and bloggers on Friday. Bridis explained that the news  
company is going to update its staff about its mysterious new  
misappropriation heat-seeking system soon via an internal webcast.

"The guidelines are coming," Bridis promised. "AP's main concern are  
not the bloggers that excerpt a relevant passage, and then derive some  
commentary. What happens an awful lot is just wholesale theft. So  
those are the ones that will find the cease and desist letters  
arriving."

OK, we said. How will you define "wholesale theft?" If somebody  
publishes a paragraph of AP copy with a link to the AP story, will  
that be theft?

"Not at all," Bridis replied. "I don't think AP would have any problem  
with that." We didn't want to give the impression that we were  
bargaining, but we pressed on as to exactly how one would disturb AP's  
comfort zone. Was this about not posting links?

No, Bridis replied. "What I'm talking about, and what has really riled  
up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste  
an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don't even comment on  
it. And it happens way more than most people realize."
L'affair Cadenhead

Bridis called the reaction to last years' food fight with the Drudge  
Retort "distorted." That may come as news to supporters of the site,  
an anti-Drudge Report, and its publisher Rogers Cadenhead, who handled  
AP's DMCA takedown requests in June 2008. Protesting an AP story  
excerpt in a post about Hillary Clinton, an AP lawyer told him that  
"the use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be  
a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few  
sentences only."

That was a misunderstanding of the concept, AP explained. The company  
"considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper  
license to be an infringement of its copyrights that additionally  
constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation." The Retort removed the item  
in question and some others. In his posts on the controversy,  
Cadenhead pointed out that the offending excerpts took as few as 33  
words from AP articles, and no more than 79.

One wonders how much the blogs AP didn't like then resemble the blogs  
Bridis now says he thinks would be OK. History may play a role in the  
decision-making process. Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association,  
which helped Cadenhead, noted that, prior to this notorious case,  
Retort had indeed posted various AP articles in their entirety, which  
is what had first drawn the company's ire.

"AP is not on some wild rampage through the blogosphere, lawyering up  
to to go after every blogger who quotes an AP story in any way," Cox  
insisted. "Yet that is how this story has been portrayed, including by  
a lot of people who should know better but are having too much fun  
bashing AP."

Cadenhead was less sanguine about the future, even after he settled  
with AP. "If AP's guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me,  
we're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use," he  
warned.
So flag me

So what's next? Here's Bridis' explanation of the new application AP  
plans to deploy.

"What we're doing is employing some technology, and the technology is  
not going to be looking for a paragraph," he disclosed. "The  
technology is going to be looking for the entire story that gets  
republished somewhere, and at that point it flags it. It doesn't do  
anything in an automated way, it's going to flag it for a lawyer or a  
paralegal to look at, and make a judgment on 'Well, is this OK? Is  
this a one-time offense?'"

OK. "Entire stories"—that's the problem?

"There are commercial websites, not even bloggers, necessarily,"  
Bridis added, "that take some of our best AP stories, and rewrite them  
with a word or two here, and say 'the Associated Press has reported,  
the AP said, the AP said.' That's not fair. We pay our reporters. We  
set up the bureaus that are very expensive to run, and, you know, if  
they want to report what the AP is reporting they either need to buy  
the service or they need to staff their own bureaus."
We need the dough

Bridis did acknowledge the importance of fair use. "Because we do it  
too, necessarily," the AP news editor conceded. "If the New York Times  
has a story, we may take an element of it and attribute it to the  
Times and build a story around it."

The rest of the discussion covered familiar debate territory. If it  
weren't for journalists, Bridis noted, bloggers wouldn't have much  
material. And he graciously placed Ars on the journalist end of the  
equation. "You guys have original content, obviously," he said. "You  
should be very protective of it. It is valuable and worthwhile. You  
should zealously guard it."

Returning the complement, it should be mentioned that AP provides  
terrific coverage of the Federal Communications Commission, my usual  
beat around here. I'm willing to bet, however, that Ars isn't about to  
launch a search-and-maybe-threaten bot against the many bloggers who  
magnify the site with their commentaries on our posts (and which may  
even include a chunk or two of Ars content).

As for AP, though, bloggers may want to prepare themselves for what is  
coming, whatever exactly that is. "We're going to be learning more  
ourselves about exactly how the technology is going to work" in about  
two weeks, Bridis said.

But about this he is sure. "You can't just taken an entire AP wire  
feed or even an entire AP story, or even half of an AP story,  
necessarily, and republish it or repurpose it," he said. "We need the  
money. The industry is falling apart."