nice post

thanks for sharing the information.

On the flip side, I’d hate to see Digg, Propeller and others suffer from what is a very good way to get publicity (traffic) to your site.

The world and particularly the net is a constantly changing and evolving medium. Thanks Andy… good post. As for me, I’ll add this then surf on over to Digg and see what kind of trouble I can get into.

It’s just like the RIAA suing over music downloads, when it was clear from the start to anyone with half a functioning brain that they should have been embracing the technology instead of fighting it. The very first thing I thought when I heard of the music industry going after napster was, “Why aren’t they selling downloads themselves?” Even with the ability to download music legally, they still want to enforce standards that simply are not reasonable.

I think the same principle is applying here. Instead of looking for the best way to compete in a digital market, the AP is looking to use brute force, and strongarm tactics to attempt to maintain control over content and it’s distribution. What they will most likely never realize is that they can’t control content and it’s distribution, and the attempt to do so is counterproductive.

I hope that they see the same fate as the RIAA, which is to say, a serious decline in relevance.

Creating a news summary based on their coverage containing all the facts might also land you in hot water.

I’m going to have to agree with Ed Sutherland here, and say that they can’t copyright the facts of a story, or even the rewording of a story as mentioned. You site a case involving an actual direct quote, but that is not the same as the facts of a story. If you’re lifting quotes, I can see how that would infringe, but facts are facts. You can write the same exact story using different words, and it is NOT copyright infringement, any more than using the same chords in a song, but in a different order is copyright infringement. If that amounted to infringement, nearly every popular artist would be out of business. It doesn’t work that way, nor should it.

The AP is doing a bang up job at relegating itself into complete irrelevance.

I think news agencies are increasingly under pressure financially so they don’t have the time to report as well as they used to. So they regurgitate stories from the internet. It is so often that I see a story on the front page of Digg then 3 days LATER it appears in the Sydney Morning Herald here in Australia.

So the companies who are VERY touchy about their intellectual property rip an increasing amount of their news off the net.
Jornalism is about to be shaken up bigtime by the internet and who knows what will be at the other end.

It is what I currently use.

I can understand the need as Errors & Omissions insurance has been used in the publishing world for many years to offset this risk.