One Last Post on Copyright, Fair Use and the AP

My last two posts have dealt with whatever it is that the Associated Press is doing these days and Media’s and the blog world's reaction to it.

Looking at what I wrote, your comments and what I further read in Media, I think I need to sum up at bit.

AP is getting a bit of a bad rap. It did what big companies do, though it appears for a misguided purpose and in an ineffective way. It used a law, the DMCA, to go after some blogs for doing the following: aggregating some links submitted from their subscribers to AP stories that included a quote from an AP article and some blogs doing so themselves AP thinks that the links with their quotes are too long and aren’t fair use under copyright law. I think AP is wrong legally, in its accusation that the quotes are infringements of its trademark, and more importantly, from a business point of view.

Curmudgeon dealt with the last point in his two comments to my posts. Blogs, when they quote and link to AP stories in AP clients’ sites, send traffic to those sites. Traffic on the internet means money for the site. Money for the site means that it continues to buy AP content.

The possible exception to this practical view seems to be a site that doesn’t link back to the site from which the quote was obtained. Even there, there is still an issue of whether the quote is fair use under copyright law.

From a PR point of view, AP isn’t going to win the battle, even if it uses the DMCA’s legal tactic of using multiple “take down” demands to blogs. Legally, most of what has been posted by the sites that AP has taken on is fair use. With all of the publicity, a public interest law firm will represent those accused, and win.

One good thing that could out of this little tempest is an internet “best practices” standard that when you quote, you attribute and you link. Not a law thing, not a business thing. Just good manners and what has always been academic honesty.