Associated Press: Winner of the Middle Finger Salute!

The Associated Press has taken it upon itself to enact a new license to bloggers to allow them to quote between 5 to 25 words from an article for their own use. This could have major repercussions as to how news is represented on blogs around the world. This new license will be offered starting at $12.50.

The Associated Press already controls 80% of the news reporting market. Every newspaper, from The New York Times to the little mom and pop enterprise in small towns across the United States, use their content. Now they are trying to control how much of their content may be used in blogs as a source of relevant information, fair-use content, or even editorials on such an Associated Press article.

Is this Legal?

The United States Copyright office, in regards to “Fair-Use” of published information says the following examples of activities have been regarded as “fair-use”:

quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

Copyright protects the particular way an author has expressed himself; it does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in the work.

In this sense, do bloggers have the right to use Associated Press content freely without being subject to lawsuits that have already been battled in the United States court system through other landmark cases? In every sense of the word, yes. Federal Government has allowed us this freedom in an effort to keep the news from being a one-sided, politically driven force in the media, and also giving our people a voice of their own.

China currently controls all of it’s own media. The citizens of China are forced to watch what the government wants it to see, with no voice as to content, political motivation, or to even question this information publicly. If they do so, they are arrested.

The Associated Press is trying to enact this same philosophy on to those of us from the United States. They think that by force-feeding their news and suggestively ‘pimping’ out their services to those that need content, they can profit by mandating mundane license agreements that the Federal Government has not approved of, nor suggested as even being legal.

This is our Press. This is our Constitution. The first lawsuit brought on by the Associated Press will be an event of historic proportions based on burying our voices six-feet under, while allowing them to have full and total control of what we see in our nation’s newspapers. This should be looked upon, not as just an injustice, but as a crime against everything this country stands for. You want a war on terror? Our own Press sparks more terror in the community than what any single event could ever do. They terrorize our minds with politically driven and motivated messages brought about to conjure up those feelings in all of us that something is wrong. How was the economy before the Press spread the word it was failing? How was gas prices before they said it ‘could’ go higher?

Our thoughts and our values continue to be challenged and brought down by those that see a threat by our own political systems and our way of life. These threats come in many forms, but uniformily, they usually attack our Constitution. Some people can not harbor the thoughts of a totally free society. A free society where people have the right to speak out and be heard, where people have the right to quote from a news article to prove a point or question it’s truth–these are threats to their way of existence.

In the last 50 years, perhaps even longer, the Associated Press has been the front-runner in news content distribution. Over the past 10 years, their license to member newspapers has continued to decrease due to the Internet. Much as Newspaper circulation numbers have fallen, so to has the Associated Press’ membership. The AP does not understand why their version of the press is failing in today’s society. They have failed to integrate technological advances that would enhance their market-share abilities, but instead are trying to rely upon their old true-to-form schematics for making this work. This will not happen.

I am currently a blogger with a fairly large audience. Before that, though, I was a Journalist.

The AP is biting the hand that feeds them. Bloggers generate massive amounts of traffic to websites other than their own, through links. If you are reading this, you already know that. Rather than embracing the traffic and embracing the same formula that newspapers have started using (making money through advertising and offering their product for free) they have decided to try to gain funds by licensing out their work…even if it is a 5 word summary of an article. This is quite a ridiculous thought. A thought that will not foster future funds, but will generate anger across the board and force others elsewhere for the same information. This is the age of the Internet. News is a finger-click away, anything the AP can do, we, as bloggers, can do faster, and better, with bigger results. This scares them.

With the news of the AP’s new licensing agreement towards bloggers, I only thought it fitting that I should give them my first Middle Finger Salute. Along the same course, I am now going to license out my own blogging content to anyone who wants to use it. Here are the restrictions:

1. Use anything, including a single word used in this article, (which includes: and, the, is, an, a etc.) and you will be forced to purchase The Adventurist License for Communicative Rights, given that you give myself and The Adventurist credit for full use of the word, including a link back to my site.

2. The Adventurist License for Communicative Rights excludes speaking of said word in public, even to yourself.

3. The Adventurist License for Communicative Rights must be purchased two weeks prior to said word’s publishing.

4. The Adventurist License for Communicative Rights will sale for a one-time $15,000 fee, as well as a $2000 bonus payment enacted upon those who use the word more than once during the lifetime of the word.

Understood?

If they can do it, I can, too.

Associated Press, we salute you in your craftiness to continuously rip people off. I award you the Middle Finger Salute for all those before me, and all those after, that will continue to go by the laws of the United States and not fall to corporate banishment or oppression in the name of corporate bullshit. We salute you.

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