The Associated Press is both angering the web and making it laugh this week. By now, I’m sure you’re familiar with the AP’s announced plans to “protect” it’s content from “misappropriation.” If not, Murdok Publisher Rich Ord has a good piece on that here.
News has now come out that the AP is even going after its own affiliates for…embedding YouTube videos uploaded to the site by the AP itself, embed code and all. Now one might think that when you upload a video to YouTube and leave that embed code enabled, the purpose is for sharing content. After all, that’s the whole point of YouTube as I understand it. Evidently the AP sees YouTube in a different light, or whoever uploads their content is unaware of the ability to disable embedding, a feature that is often used by other content producers (though the reasoning behind this itself is still baffling to some).
Here’s what a YouTube Channel looks like (This is Google Webmaster Central’s). I’d show a screenshot of the AP’s, but wouldn’t want to “misappropriate” it. And I certainly wouldn’t want to “misappropriate” it by linking to it.
“In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness,” says Erick Schonfeld.
As the greater Fair Use debate rages on, Hitwise has put together some research looking at how the relationship between news content and those the AP alleges are “misusing” content. “Search engines and news aggregators were all somewhat implicated as those who may be misusing content, so we decided to take a look at their impact upon driving traffic to news websites, which ultimately generate ad revenues,” writes Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty. Search drove 22% of traffic to news and media sites in March. Look at the following graphs:
“Although several of the online aggregators are at the heart of the content distribution argument, they do successfully send visits to news properties rather than keeping them upon their own websites,” says Dougherty.
Every so often, the AP comes out and brings up their debate again. It’s been going on for years. Will the way it is done change or will the AP and other publishers find that they simply need to adjust to the times? Here’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks.
