Boycott The Associated Press (AP)

Hell hath no fury like bloggers bullied, or at least like bloggers served with one to many DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) requests. Roger Cadenhead of the Drudge Retort received 7 DMCA letters from the Associated Press for publishing snippets of articles originally published by AP News. Read Cadenhead’s post on the Associated Press’ 7 DMCA letters for the gory details, but here’s a snippet. I’m pretty sure Cadenhead won’t send me a DMCA letter for publishing it:

The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles — ranging in length from 33 to 79 words — and five of the six have a user-created headline.

Here’s one of the six disputed blog entries:

Clinton Expects Race to End Next Week

Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. “I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds,” she said. “I think that is the natural progression that one would expect.”

If you follow the link, you’ll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.

….
In another DMCA takedown, AP contends that the following user comment is a copyright violation:

Well, the oil execs just put another refinery in South Dakota. Maybe they’re a bunch of retards.

www.foxnews.com

Hyperion has said the project, about 60 miles south of Sioux Falls, would create 1,800 permanent jobs and another 4,500 construction jobs over a four-year period. Construction could begin in 2010.

The Hyperion Energy Center would process 400,000 barrels of thick Canadian crude oil a day, which company executives say would help the U.S. reduce its dependence on overseas oil. The company has said it will bring in the crude oil by pipeline but has announced no specific plans for that transportation link.

The user reproduced the last two paragraphs of his comment from the linked Fox News article, written by AP.

AP has filed copyright lawsuits against the VeriSign division Moreover last fall and another against the Florida company All Headline News this year.

Some of us have had enough, including Jeff Jarvis who called for a blogger boycott of AP content. Liza at culturekitchen fills out the story even more here and here and urges bloggers to join the Media Bloggers Association. I want to include a snippet from her first post on the subject about the impact of the DMCA:

Adding a quote to a blog post is very much like the sampling of a hook or a beat on a song. It’s why so many people were opposed to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It’s not only that albums like Beck’s Odelay or Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet would never had happened. Documentaries, archival works, opinion or scholarly writing would be all but non-existent if it means that now journalists, bloggers, historians and scholars would need to pay publishing houses for every single quote and/or sample they need for their work.

That’s why I blame Hilary Rosen, the woman who became the face of the RIAA and the lobbyists who successfully paid Congress to pass the DMCA. Granted, I applauded her for her recent “I am not a bargaining chip” post, in re: the other Hillary (La Clinton), but it doesn’t mean La Rosen gets a free pass.

The DMCA’s main purpose is to circumvent due process by saying that trade laws trump civil rights law. So a corporation’s right to make money from their “product” however way they want trumps the rights of individual citizens who would want to express themselves freely about said product through comment, parody, sample or quoting.

The DMCA throws the onus of proving Fair Use on the individual “speaking” the copyrighted materials and not on the owner of the copyright. It was an unprecedented move and one that many consider anti-constitutional since it basically allows for individuals to be considered guilty of copyright infringement until they prove themselves only in a court of law to be innocent.

I’ve published posts before about bloggers’ rights and legal resources so be sure to check those out. But my purpose in writing about Cadenhead’s case is to urge fellow bloggers to join the boycott and stop using AP content until they back off medium and small-scale bloggers. If the AP measured how much additional traffic bloggers have sent TO their content as a result of quoting snippets with appropriate links, they wouldn’t be taking this approach. As someone pointed out, BlogBurst is enabling news outlets to use blog content because those news outlets recognize that content exchange works both ways. An arrangement that the AP clearly does not understand–too concerned with the ownership of content, rather than its distribution.

Bloggers on record as boycotting AP content that I know of so far:

Drudge Retort
Newshoggers
Culture Kitchen
Buzz Machine
WordYard
Reno and Its Discontents
West Virginia Blue

Of course Reno blogger Ryan Jerz knows all about the problems receiving a DMCA request from a determined source can cause. If you decide to fight teh

Similar Posts:

• Join bloggers in boycotting the AP
• It’s Bipartisan. Bloggers Boycott and Taunt the AP
• Blogger Shut Down By ABC For Publicizing Hate Speech

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