The Associated Press has announced its plan to launch an initiative to protect news content from “misappropriation” online.
“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” says AP Chairman Dean Singleton.
The AP claims to be developing a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used. The initiative would apparently also include the development of new search pages that point users to the “latest and most authoritative sources” of breaking news. Staci D. Kramer at paidContent.org reports:
That doesn’t mean withdrawing licensed content or sliding it all behind pay walls, but finding ways to “retain the value of news,” Sue Cross, AP’s SVP for Global New Media & Media Markets, Americas, told me in advance of the meeting. “Nobody wants to stop web traffic,” she emphasized. But news organizations are looking for ways to make sure their sites benefit from that traffic. (I couldn’t resist suggesting it would help if news organizations didn’t kill their own traffic, as NYTimes.com did when it carried out a link massacre during the switch from IHT.com to the news global edition.) Cross also stressed that this is not about AP content specifically, but about the newspaper industry online.
The AP has been attached to a history of online content-related controversy Back in 2007, CEO Tom Curley announced that they would come after anyone using its content without paying for the privilege to do so.
The NYT reference made by Kramer was in regards to a week or so ago when the Times eliminated 993,000 article pages as it rolled International Hearld Tribune into the NYT site. Instead of redirecting the articles to the same article on NYT, they all simply went to one landing page. The irony is that NYT was among the major publishers seeking special treatment from Google.
