The Associated Press is adding software to its articles, intended to inform readers of usage rights associated with the content — and act as a policing agent, automatically informing the AP about how the article elsewhere online.
Each article will be published with a digital "wrapper" — data not visible to users that maximizes the content's ranking in search engines and tracks its movements across the web. The program will be introduced in stages stretching over the course of the next year, and will eventually be unrolled to pictures and videos.
The act stems from a conviction that news articles — the licensing and syndication of which serves as AP's flagship business model — should not appear on websites, or even search engines, without express permission, The New York Times reports. According to President/CEO Tom Curley of the AP, even minimal use of a news article — such as a headline and link appearing in a search engine, for example — should require a licensing agreement with the originating news organization.
This time last year, the AP lodged a critique against online news sites and bloggers that quote large excerpts from its stories, even if they link back to sources. The nonprofit's complaint reignited a dormant debate about the interpretation of "fair use," which bloggers, search engines and news aggregators say generally protect them if their citations are brief and source credits generous.
The AP's stance was roundly criticized in the blogosphere. Writer Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, a popular tech news site, boycotted the use of AP material thereafter, arguing the agency "doesn't get to make its own rules around how its content is used — if those rules are stricter than the law allows."
It was also suggested that the AP was attacking its strongest potential ally, as news content is increasingly consumed online. "Heavy bloggers," which account for 84 percent of time spent on blog sites, are more likely than average users to consume news and entertainment online (via 2008 data from comScore). A February 2009 survey from TubeMogul also found that blogs provide 80% of referred traffic to online videos.
Curley refused to address the matter of fair use, saying simply that "We're not picking the legal remedy today."
But the CEO also made it clear that the AP's beef with story-snatching is not merely a matter of journalistic ethic.
"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," he proclaimed, expressing his belief that the stance would ideally not result in less use of news articles, but paid use of them.
The AP hopes the 1400 American newspapers which own and support it will contribute to the movement by using its software. But while news organizations can already opt to prevent their work from appearing in search engines, most acknowledge that doing this would significantly reduce their site traffic — and with that, ad revenue.
Earlier this month, the AP launched a pilot for a digital news "microformat," which synopsizes the content and metadata of online news stories.
In what would appear to be a slight deviation of opinion from CEO Curley's present stance, VP-Tech Development Todd Martin said the microformat, which is free to use by any news content publisher, "[applies] the basic principles of simplicity, reuse and semantic presentation specifically for news content."
