The Associated Press and its member newspapers will take legal action against Web sites that use newspaper articles without legal permission, the group said on Monday … [1]
Is this the beginning of the end? In a lot of ways I’d rather be crafting poems about catch basins and studying Robert Fludd if the MSM is going to start shooting at us for feeding the sidebar.
Thoughts?
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[1]: "A.P. Moving to Halt Use of Newspaper Articles on Web Sites", by Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times, April 6, 2008.
They are sailing along worried about a drip in the cabin corner when their seacocks are open and they are going down. Everyone should be considering what they will do in the near future when most newspapers are gone. They are losing subscribers and the local sale of electronic editions can not succeed as long as cheap wide-band is not common to at least metro areas.
Who will write the stories and how will we decide if they have any trustworthiness at all? That is already a major issue with the current batch of ‘journalists’ who I see as undereducated children pushing their pet ideologies.
I have always wondered about this, sounds like a new beginning.
A last ditch attempt to throw out a lifeline. Their days were numbered when the internet started growing.
Igor’s word is pensive and that is how I feel about the quality of reporting being done these days.
Internet may have delivered the final blow, but the papers were badly battered from years of TV 24 hour news programs such as CNN.
IBM attempted the same sort of, “use our computer or none at all” posture. How did that work for ‘em?
I understand their desperation, however, threats of lawsuits will hasten their personal appearance at a bankruptcy suite.
Playing devil’s advocate for a minute, it kind of makes sense, and this isn’t really a newspaper issue. Online sites often get money through ad revenue, and many of the articles have sections cut-and-pasted over to another website – such as most blog sites – and THOSE sites get all the traffic. I do see how thin the line is between “I saw this article and here’s what I think about these two paragraphs” vs. “reprinting” it on your own site. If CNN.com has a journalist (*cough*, if they have any) write up a story and post it, then someone else comes along and cut-n-pastes most of it onto their blog, they lose money – in theory, anyway, since it assumes the blog reader would have gone to CNN to read it, but now they won’t, and that they only read the blog because of the articles harvested from elsewhere.
And I want to make clear I don’t mean this as a slam against this site – very little of the original source articles get posted here, so I don’t see how anyone could complain. If anything, it likely generates more traffic for the original article.
Mish’s site, on the other hand, I’ve seen like all but 2 paragraphs of an article reprinted. Is that bad? I don’t know..
Linenoise-
We never repost entire articles here without permission. It’s not only a violation of copyright, it violates the “Golden Rule”. Every now and then I find a post of ours reprinted in its entirety,on some blog. [Sometimes without credit.] I resent the theft of our work.
Reprinting portions however, is a different story. I know that using a quote of ours, properly credited, is a great driver of traffic. It would be foolish of newspapers to fight this sort of exposure.