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The Associated Press announcement that it would “protect” its online content by including special html code in the stories it distributes to its member papers raised hackles around the internet from bloggers and media critics who see the move as trampling on their rights to comment on stories, or as a short-sighted business move, or both.
They needn’t worry since A.P. management does not understand what the technology actually does, and doesn’t do.
The A.P. said it would be implementing hNews, a kind of html code embedded in news stories that lets news publishers tell browsers and search engines who wrote a story, where it was written, what the story’s headline is, when a story was published and what kind of copyright is attached to the story.
By adding these structured and agreed-upon codes to the underside of online news pages, news sites can let search engines can make more sense of their stories and letting people search for news by time, date or author. (Other microformats that are widely accepted currently include hCard, a way to embed detailed contact info in a web page.)
As a means of improving indexing and search this approach works just fine. As a shield against unauthorized use of content, however, it is easily thwarted. Indeed, it is designed to detect unauthorized use under conditions a content thief would be unlikely to use: Simply cutting and pasting AP content will remove all underlying code (as an overly ambitious aggregator might). So will re-typing it (as a commenting blogger might).
While it rails against (and sues) bloggers and small-time aggregators, the AP with this technological shield seems instead to be targeting what Jane Seagrave, the collective’s VP for global product development, calls “systematic misappropriation” of content — the sort of operation that illegally taps into a news feed and pushes it through to a web page. The debate, of course, is whether copying a headline and a lead paragraph, and linking back to the source of the story in its entirety, is even misappropriation at all. News cannot be copyrighted, only the specific way it is reported.
Nothing in copyright law requires a blogger or commenter to include the meta-tags if they use an excerpt in a blog post. In fact for a blogger to comply, they’ll have to do more than just cut and paste – they will have to view the source code on a newspaper’s site, search through the HTML and javascript to find the text of the story and its micro-formats. Once the thief has gone to this trouble the purloined story will call home to report where it is being re-printed, via a Web Bug url embedded in the story. Only then would The News Registry even be aware of this use.
While it has contract with many major online vendors of its stories — including much-maligned Google — the A.P. thinks that theft undermines the value of the stories on its members websites and jeopardizes the millions the A.P. spends to cover international, state and federal news. But the sites that actually reprint A.P. content in full without permission are few and make little money. Popular aggregation sites such as Huffington Post, Yahoo News or Techmeme get their traffic by reprinting headlines and linking to the original story — while creating an audience for that aggregation service. They are not charging for content, but for an experience.
Which is not to say that A.P. is wrong to try and protect the value of its content. Online ad revenues for newspapers are a small fraction of what newspapers traditionally made from display and classified ads in paper editions, a business that traditionally earned publishers more than 20 percent profit margins. Meanwhile online ad revenues remain weak as the number of pages online continues to explode, making the prices for advertising online continue to fall, even for premium sites.
We don’t have much hope the AP News Registry will do anything to stem that tide. But even if fails to do technologically what it is purports to do, the AP thinks that there is value in laying down a marker. “It is like posting a ‘No Trespassing’ sign on your property,” Seagrave said.
See Also:
- AP to Aggregators: We Will Sue You
- AP Defeats Online Aggregator That Rewrote Its News
- Obama ‘Hope’ Artist Sues AP In Copyright Flap
- AP Could Lose 10 Percent of Staff in 2009
- AP Stylebook Is All A-Twitter Over New Tech Terms
Source: Ryan Singel
