The Following Form Is Going To Affect Every Blog You Read
If you’ve been paying attention to Old Media Vs. New Media wars over the last few years, you’ll know that Associated Press has been getting hot under the collar for a while over the matter of bloggers — not to mention Google — reposting their content. In the journo racket, AP is basically as close to being The Man as it could get. It is an unwieldy beast and an unfriendly machine that has been gobbling up the content space of your local daily for years now. Ironically, at the same time AP has been all but taking over the pages of, say, The Inky — the Metro laudably dumped AP last year and hired writers to focus on hyperlocal news — it’s been going after bloggers whom AP believes, with the strange disconnect that only massive media corporations can fathom, are ripping AP off by not paying the licensing fees other news orgs must pay to use their content.
Last week, Mashable uncovered what you see before you: The processing form by which AP would like bloggers to use to license AP content. It’s run through a partnership with iCopyright, and the whole thing is as laughable as it is portentous. Fact is, paying $12.50 to license five words illustrates that AP feigns indifference to Fair Use laws; it also feigns indifference to the fact that no one in the blogosphere, and we mean no one, is going to use this. But it is the shape of things to come; as we speak, traditional news organizations are preparing for what will, in all likelihood, be a futile battle over the next few years to try and squeeze dough, pennies at a time, from their online content. It’s going to be embarrassing for them. But not for all of the reasons you might think. Sure, the model will fall on its face (to the peril of journalism in all formats), but it’s also going to cut off what is currently blogging’s biggest disease: Cut and paste. With bloggers increasingly on notice that reposting grafs, if not whole stories, is a lazy no-no that now can even get one into mildly hot, or at least lukewarmly annoying, water, it’s going to make more people say things instead of paste things. We dig this. We dig this a lot.
