The Associated Press stirred a lot of bad press last week when it decided to sue bloggers, namely the Drudge Retort, for daring to talk about some AP articles. Turns out, the blogosphere is quite strong, and the Associated Press took some egg on the face for its heavy-handedness.
This week, the Associated Press is backpedaling, claiming its threats to the Drudge Retort were over the top, and AP execs plan to meet with the Media Bloggers Association to define clear rules about what bloggers can and cannot do with Associated Press content.
Don't think too highly of the AP yet. The backpedal is not 100% on the up-and-up. According to an article in the New York Times, AP vice president and strategy director Jim Kennedy said that the AP wants to stop excessive copying and pasting of text directly from AP articles into blog posts. However, according to Kennedy, even a recap of content from an AP article could be considered excessive as far as the AP is concerned. His solution - just include a link to the original AP article, but you're not allowed to talk about it at all.
With that in mind, I'm going to rewrite this post without referring to any of the sources I found elsewhere on the web that served as the basis of this post. Ready? Here goes...
Interesting news today. Read this article from the New York Times. I'd say more, but that would require recapping the story, which according to the AP, violates fair use, so I'm not allowed to talk about it on my blog.
Photo: Flickr
» Associated Press to Charge Bloggers for Citing as Few as 5 Words from MarketingBlurb
The Associated Press has announced a new "Excerpt for Web Use" policy to make it clear to bloggers what they can and cannot do with AP content. After suing bloggers for using as few as 5 words in posts, the... [Read More]
Tracked on: June 18, 2008 8:51 AM | Permalink to Trackback