Text: Richard Perez-Pena (New York Times, July 23, 2009)
Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press (AP) said Thursday that it would add secret software to each article. The aim is to show what limits apply to the rights to use it; the software notifies the AP how the article is used.
Tom Curley, the AP’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article -- a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.
Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond the AP, a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.
“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,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.
Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of "fair use." Executives at some news organizations have said they are reluctant to test the Internet boundaries of fair use, for fear that the courts would rule against them. More>>
