BuzzMachine

Hi Jeff,

Long time, no read. It seems we only bump into each other when there’s a ridiculous fair use case like this one.

I don’t have trackbacks anymore (too much spam) so I’m leaving you a link that summarizes what happened this weekend –and why lawsuit happy organizations like AP better think twice before messing with the blogosphere:

Netroots’ bloggers boycott of Associated Press is working
http://culturekitchen.com/node/12423/

Pluribus, they are not entitled to trample on the rights of citizens to turn Fair Use of text into the craziness that music sampling has turned into.

It’s one more reason why the DMCA has to be overturned. It’s anti-constitutional not only because it tramples on free speech but it blatantly does away with due process by giving corporations to right to say you’re guilty of copyright infringement and now it’s your onus to prove your innocence.

Cheers,
liza

Liza Sabater, Publisher
http://culturekitchen.com

I have a small sports-related website read by only a few hundred a week but my policy has always been that when I see an AP article, I look for the original article in the hometown paper and link to it. I never link to something that has “Associated Press” as the byline. Why send the (admittedly small amount of) traffic to an aggregator instead of the original source? It rarely takes more than a minute or so to find the original article.

Pluribus, every reasonable person can agree that the AP is entitled to their rights. They are not however entitled to redefine fair use so that others are denied rights of their own. The AP has every right to get upset about whole stories being reposted without licensing, but no right at all to push people around for mere quotes.

The point of complaining about it is to send the message that this is bad behavior and we won’t tolerate it. Content bullying under the DMCA has gotten atrocious, if indeed it was ever not. What a total disaster of a law, penned at just the time that copyright policy should have shifted even more in favor of consumers than the already well-protected producers.

IANAL… the last time a got overheated about “fair use” I learned that it is NOT a right. It is a legal defense. Which means thay can ask you to take down the offending text and sue you if you don’t comply. You can then use “fair use” as a defense in the suit and MAY win (or escape damages).

Needless, to say. Copies has a cost approaching zero for most media.
Controlling copies as a business strategy is doomed to failure… how many fingers does it take to fix a broken dike?

The AP will suffer huge looses in “good will” with this campaign to try to control their words to this degree. They would be better served by trying to get the copied text to link back to their internet properties and benefit from the attention generated as a result of being a source.

Train the borrowers to respect the source and demand links back to AP properties. Manage the AP properties for revenue generating potential.

Don’t send attention away from your properties… that’s like the NY Times first attempt to create value from their Web content: $59/year? and few takers. Now, they are open and generating huge revenues from ads… duh.

AP needs an “advertising” strategy… and fast. Before they trash their brand so severely that consumers reject anything with their brand attached.

PS> Rogers Cadenhead could use some help with a “fair use” defense if he stands his ground for changing the game in the courts. As a small business owner it’s likely he’ll let someone much bigger take on the case.
Mike Arrington is a lawyer and he’s taking the “boycott” route… and his properties have a lot more revenue than Cadenhead’s. But court is always a waste for the small business owner… avoid it when possible. Lawyers are professionals that bill their time at very high rates and courts are still in “beta” in terms of efficiency and quality of results.

I quote a Lot in my blogs, from a lot of stories from all over the globe, ap and otherwise. How the hell do they plan to even use a “fair use” argument and have it hold water?
They are just trying to scare off bloggers so they can protect “their” content, despite the fact that it’s almost impossible to defend from the standpoint of “Fair Use”, unless you just lift the whole story without doing anything else to it, .
I Don’t know about you, but I’m gonna push their buttons and quote ap stories even more, just to see what they do. These idiots at the AP can kiss my ass.

“[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism.” Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841),

election-coverage.com
mikeytherhino.wordpress.com

Sorry make that http://www.unassociatepress.net – oops… A bit too Eurocentric on that domain name – bad habit!

Your arguments are pretty childish, Jeff. “Back Off”? Come on. “you declared war on the bloggers. Remember that.” ? Don’t make me laugh.

For-profit bloggers like Drudge and Techcrunch should pay a license fee, then they can use all the AP content they like. It’s what every small-town newspaper does, why shouldn’t bloggers just because their medium is the screen, not paper?

Fair Use:

“[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism.” Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841)

Fair Use was intended to allow a critcal reviewer to embed segments of copy protected works in a review. The nature of “Drudge Retort” does NOT meet this criteria. It embeds text from AP without any surrounding critical analysis.
As such it does not meet the intent of Fair Use, IMHO.

Of course, I would like to see the law modified to allow quotations for copy protected works in all fields: text, music, photography and video.
This would enbale the individual to create mashups, collages, new mixes and documentary video using the new personal digital creative desktop and on-line tools (blogs, downloads, podcats, etc).

One can only hope that we see such a shift in the next few years.

Make art legal. Historical examples are numerous and most pass the fair use defense:

Picasso’s Guernica used segments of a a newspaper.
and munber of “Variations on a Theme by…”
any song that sounds like Chuck Berry wrote it: “Back in the USSR”

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagarism?

Larry Lessig on the SCOTUS, please.

Lummox, you’re ignoring my point – which has the answer you’re looking for.

“The point of complaining about it is to send the message that this is bad behavior and we won’t tolerate it.”

Uh huh. Then whatcha gonna do?

Even if every blogger boycotts AP, then AP will carry on just as they did before. You can “declare war” and you can stamp your feet, and you can huff and puff – and none of it matters.

“Content bullying under the DMCA has gotten atrocious, if indeed it was ever not. What a total disaster of a law, penned at just the time that copyright policy should have shifted even more in favor of consumers than the already well-protected producers.”

Uh huh. Then whatcha gonna do?

Hey, maybe you can “send another message” – that everyone ignores again.

Reread my earlier post. The way to make AP go away and give up is to create better news. There must be someone smarter and more curious than the AP goons. Like I said, is that so hard to imagine?

For you, it seems, it is.

But keep sending those messages! They’re really gonna work.

Pluribus,

I don’t think I made my point clearly:

“Make art legal”

A lot of art reuses prior art by taking plot points, characters, quotations, images and music segments and makes a new work from these elements.

In the restricting world of the DCMA such art is illegal.

Almost all the classic Disney animated movies are re-workings of stories in the public domain: mostly the Brother Grimm.

It’s this type of folk art I would like to see legally defended and protected from large corporate threats of law suits. Think of the the Stars Wars spin offs (fan created art) that we’re restricted by Lucas Film to protect their “rights”.

That’s what I mean by “make art legal”… I view the issue from the point of view of the single creative that wants to re-mix culture.

Making money from the art has always been the major problem the art must deal with. Now, the artist must deal with people that thin they are taking money from them through re-use.

“Send lawyers, guns and money.”

Where have I been when all of this went down? It’s almost like the funny papers. Sign me up for the boycott. I don’t care if they know they have been boycotted or not. It is about me doing what I have to do to make a stand. The Power of One is immense.