[1]Last time you heard me rant about the Associate Press was in relation to Rogers Cadenhead's plight, where he was hit with more than 7 take-down demands and threatened with a lawsuit. Please read "AP has their legal vampires chasing bloggers. I blame Hilary Rosen" [2] and "More about the AP copyright takedowns against Rogers Cadenhead" [3] for the back story.
Well, within hours there was a boycott of the Associated Press by a big chunk of the single and community blogs that form the "netroots". Why? Because we have back channels of communication through which we talk to each other for either political or business purposes.
That was the case this past weekend.
Rogers sent an email to mailing list in which about 150 of the top progressive and liberal in the country. Some of us commented to Rogers' plight with both replies to his email and a blog post. One of the people in the list, Cernig of Newshogger [4], exasperated wrote back that it was time to boycott them. That prompted Richard Kastelein of Atlantic Free Press [5] to create a website, unAssociated Press [6], that would be the focus of the boycott along with buttons and banners to spread the news on all our sites.
The news spread like wildfire and republican and technology sites, the largest being TechCrunch [7], joined the boycott by the time I woke up today to read in the New York Times that Associated Press think they may have been a wee bit heavy handed in the way they went about doing things.
Tough shit.
As I had said in one of emails, I was betting they went after Drudge Retort [8] because it was big enough in traffic yet obscure enough that their shakedown and threats wouldn't be heard around the blogosphere.
Think about it : Why not go after DailyKos which has about 10 times the traffic of Drudge Retort and by volume would have even more of their so-called copyright infractions happening, especially in the diaries section?
Again, I am absolutely certain they thought that by going to a mid-size blog they'd get to cash in on their threats and shakedown without risk of a scandal.
Remember, in the world of lawyers, precedence is everything. If they could set a legal precedence with Drudge Retort, then they'd be able to go to the whole blogosphere --and in their mind expand their licensing business.
This is again all about the money. The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence Français Presse, they all make money out licensing the rights to publish the bits of international news they put out into the world to make money. It's why back in 2002, when George Bush was banging the drums of war, you couldn't find any news that were not pro-Bush unless you went to places like the BBC.
Actually, back in 2002 the BBC would divert their US traffic to a kind of BBC America and it was difficult to read through their own site the news as presented to citizens of the UK and the European Union. So in those days we'd have to clear caches and remove cookies a lot in order to "enter" to the UK site by "lying" to the website : They had a splash page that ask "Where are you coming from?" and I'd click UK. Once accepted, then I was able to read the news from an European perspective.
It took about a year for the BBC to get a clue and they gave up on this sequestering and segregation of their traffic and their news. Yet it gives you an idea about how much manipulation goes into the dissemination of the news, even from a respected organization like the BBC.
To the AP I say, your days are numbered. Google may have paid you for the right to link to your articles at Google News, but the reality is that the blogosphere is as big if not larger than Google. What's worse for you is that many of us do understand what Fair Use is all about.
The blogosphere will never be your new market.
You will never make money out of our linking to your articles re-publishing quotes.
[9] | 
[10] | 
[11] | 
[12] | 
[13] | 
[14]