AP Decides to Shoot Itself in the Foot
You would think that "most" would include The Associated Press (AP), but apparently not.
Rogers Cadenhead has long run a site called the Drudge Retort at www.drudge.com. Today he posted the news that the site has been targeted by the Associated Press with DMCA takedown orders. AP is complaining about a bunch of posts on Drudge Retort that contain brief excerpts of longer AP stories and links to those stories on other sites.
According to the AP, this is copyright infringement. (Here’s the text of the complaint.)
If the AP is right, then something like 99.9% of the world’s millions of bloggers are engaged in copyright infringement, simply by excerpting the articles bloggers link to.
Something’s wrong with this picture!
Fair use has always been a sticky area of the law because there are no clear boundaries to what’s acceptable; instead there is a set of principles that get weighed to determine whether the reuse of copyrighted material is considered to fall under fair use.
If you don't see how this is a stupid move, imagine this: this sort of takedown succeeds. Sites (such as Digg, or here) stop linking to AP stories. Although this doesn't affect AP itself, it affects the sites that carry AP licensed stories and those will eventually want to pay less - as their traffic is less. AP, do you get it yet?
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That really is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. I mean Drudge is one of the biggest sites out there to get news from, and as the story pointed out all it's doing is driving more traffic to the site. Whats next? Will they place a C&D on radio stations that report their news stories? Sue NBC or CBS for reporting the news? How stupid! |
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I cannot say that I really understand this either....why in the world would this be such an issue? I guess if drudge was contorting the words of said article and giving it a completely different spin then MAYBE there'd be a case for slander (I don't remember the term for written-slander). However copyright infringement sounds like someone just scrambled to come up with the first offense they coudl think of and put it on paper....dumb |
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I believe the term you were looking for is libel, though I'm pretty sure they both apply to written and verbal. |
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