In reaction to the recent events surrounding the heavy handed move by the Associated Press to impose guidelines (and ridiculous fees) on the exerpted copy in the blogosphere, a new website billing itself as the Unassociated Press is urging bloggers to create a multipartisan buzz and let AP hear all political bloggers loud and clear. All of this is in reaction to the Associated Press issued DMCA takedowns last week to Drudge Retort bloggers for excerpting short snippets of its articles.
This scenario reminds me of the 1976 Sidney Lumet directed film Network, where the main character Howard Beale (portrayed by Peter Finch) aka the “mad prophet of the air-waves” gives a raving revelation about how the media has turned the news into entertainment for their own profit (shhh, don’t tell CNN or MSNBC). The most memorable (and often quoted) part of the film occurs when an obviously enraged Beale launches into one of the most memorable film speeches of our time…
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‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: |
For those of you who’ve never seen the film “Network”, here’s a clip from YouTube but be warned, although this movie was made over 30 years ago, it just might startle you how relevant the concepts are to our current existence…
If you’re a blogger and have somehow missed the news regarding the AP’s strongarm tactics which rival the RIAA’s nastiness in terms of censoring the internet to maintain their own bottom line, the New York Times carried a story The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs on June 16th which briefly highlighted the AP’s stance on this strange, new initiative of theirs.
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The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.
Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words. On Friday, The A.P. issued a statement defending its action, saying it was going to challenge blog postings containing excerpts of A.P. articles “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.” An A.P. spokesman declined Friday to further explain the association’s position. |
Of course, this ignorant action by the AP has set off fireworks across the blogosphere with bloggers such as Daily Kos openly defying the AP’s announcement of a new fee schedule called the Excerpt for Web Use Policy that bloggers have to pay to cite text from AP articles. The fees are as follows:
- 5-25 words = $12.50
- 26-50 words = $17.50
- 51-100 words = $25.00
- 101-250 words = $50.00
- 251 words and up = $100.00
If you’re scratching your head and still don’t believe all of this nonsense. Maybe it’s some sort of sick, twisted, latent April Fool’s day prank, have a look at the Associated Press Content Services webpage where these morons actually expect bloggers to fill out a form with a cut and paste of the text fragment you want to excerpt along with the url where you will be publishing the exerpt on.
Have these dinosaurs at the AP even realized that the majority of bloggers are using software to publish their articles and that the url of their story is not fully formed until the moment after the blogger presses the “publish” button ? How on earth would a blogger be able to submit their url they intend to use an excerpt on before they’ve published their story?
Not to mention, what is an AP writer who borrows content from a blog for use in an AP syndicated article supposed to do about compensating the blogger who initially broke the story? It’s a well known fact that, more often that not these days, bloggers (and YouTube users) are breaking news BEFORE the AP writers can prostitute it to their streetcorner pimps known as newspapers. How many times have we seen a story pop up on Digg or Reddit only to see it coming across CNN or MSNBC’s air-waves hours (or days in the case of print media) after it was already “old news” on the internet.
Is the Associated Press jealous that they have been made obsolete by the social phenomenon known as blogging?
Publishers and affiliates worldwide who were less than enthusiastic about eBay’s decision to take their affiliate program “in-house” as opposed to operating it through Commission Junction have now been expressing distress about EPN’s shoddy tracking and reporting. Many publishers have been reporting a significant decrease in earnings since the switch from CJ to EPN and there have even been reports of EPN expiring affiliates for the quality of the traffic they are driving to eBay’s auctions. The EPN discussion boards have been flooded with disgruntled affiliates threatening