Panicky AP Lashes Out at The Internet

It didn’t take long — just three days — after a well-reasoned argument proposing that the Associated Press is partly to blame for destroying the newspaper business for the AP to react. Today, management at the news service said it will demand that the major search engines, content aggregators and other websites obtain explicit permission and pay AP to reproduce its content, producing a new revenue source for the non-profit cooperative to share with its member newspapers.

The AP is threatening legal action against those who do not comply.

What is my reaction? This is wrong-headed on almost every level imaginable.

First, although The New York Times reports that this move is directed mainly at the usual big suspects, Google, Yahoo, and the like, it’s hard to see the logic behind that on a number of levels:

• Those companies already pay substantial licensing rights to use AP content, generating a substantial amount of AP’s annual revenue.
• Those companies are sending a huge volume of traffic back to the AP’s member newspaper sites via free, organic search — traffic Google and Yahoo could begin to charge for, if they were so inclined.
• Beyond the licensed content feed, what other AP material appears? Just the snippets, which are headlines and abstracts almost certainly covered under Fair Use doctrines in search results.

For these and other reasons, this announcement today strikes me as an empty threat, probably posturing by executives whose members are already rebelling by threatening to stop paying their annual membership fees and/or by forming separate cooperatives outside of AP’s control.

There is an air of desperation setting over the print journalism world, one that reminds me of the dark shadows cast across the earth by the alien spaceships in that movie Independence Day. One difference is this isn’t fiction, so no Hollywood scriptwriter can help the AP or its member papers fight their way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves in.

What does a cornered beast do? Lash out at Google and Yahoo, that’s what. We have an idiom warning against that — “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”

Thanks to Cathy Taylor here at Bnet Media for alerting me to this story.