The Microsoft-Yahoo search deal was big news this past week, and I took plenty of press calls about it, including from the AP. But to quote what I told the AP, I have to pay them $17.50.
Here’s the article, where I’m quoted as saying:
It really hard to tell whether (Bartz) just thinks Yahoo isn’t that strong in search or whether she thinks she needs to jettison search to save the company,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter SearchEngineLand.
For the record, I love APs reporters and am always happy to serve as a source. The reporters at the AP have nothing to do with the absurdities of AP’s business side. The business side declares that if I want to quote myself from that article, using the AP’s online form, it will cost me $17.50.
Crazy. It’s just some of the strangeness about AP’s licensing approach that I outlined back in May and which got renewed attention this weekend after I twittered about it again.
My post from Sunday explains how this weekend’s attention got kicked off. If you think the charge for me quoting myself is bizarre, check out James Grimmelmann’s post, about how he paid $12 for a license to quote Thomas Jefferson — words that the AP doesn’t own.
Grimmelmann’s post prompted the AP to issue a statement:
The iCopyright form that enables users to license AP content online is drawing new attention this week.
It is an automated form, thus explaining how one blogger got it to charge him for the words of a former president.
As the AP stated more than a year ago, the form is not aimed at bloggers. It is intended to make it easy for people who want to license AP content to do so.
AP partners with iCopyright to automate fulfillment of routine requests for rights to republish AP material, either from AP-hosted sites or member and customer sites carrying AP content. The licensing options vary greatly, from an array of uses – such as e-mail, print and save – through paid options up to and including large-scale corporate reprints of excerpts, full articles or photos.
ICopyright’s role is unrelated to the AP’s new content registry, announced in late July: http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/pr_072309a.html
The AP’s relationship with iCopyright dates to April of last year: http://info.icopyright.com/news_041408_ap.asp
I bet it was drawing attention. My tweet this weekend has currently caused nearly 4,000 views (as measured by bit.ly) of a permissions form for a story about the Sotomayor confirmation. Personally, I bet that set some type of record for those permission forms.
Well it was on my list to questions to ask AP to clarify the iCopyright situation, but they’ve refused to talk to me or supposedly answer any questions about fair use guidelines. So I guess I’m glad that eventually I got them to put some information about it out there, however it happens.
But yeah, we know the forms are not related to the new content registry. That doesn’t exist now. How it’s going to work, how bloggers are supposed to quote AP material until it is launched, what the AP’s stance is on “fair use” all remains incredibly confused. And since the AP won’t talk about this, things will remain confused, and the iCopyright form effectively speaks for it.
Solution? Getting out of the AP ivory tower and having a frank dialog with people about decent licensing schemes might help.
My “Free” Isn’t A Four-Letter Word Offline, So Why Does The Media Hate It Online? post from yesterday gets into this more. It’s not as well thought out as I’d like, and certainly could benefit from others who actually understand the type of licensing that happens with things like radio. But the premise is simple. iTunes helped popularize cheap downloadable music, to the degree that I think for many people, it made more sense to buy a “legit” copy than to try and download illegal copies.
Give bloggers a cheap license to liberally quote AP articles, with a requirement to link. AP makes lots of long tail money, potentially. AP gets lots of traffic, as well. Being an authority site (if they actually established a decent news portal that didn’t tick their members off) would easily out rank all these other uses.
Of course, from afar, I think the reason the AP doesn’t want to talk is that they appear to have no idea what they’re doing. The registry is still in development. It won’t necessarily solve their perceived copyright woes. Meanwhile, they appear to want to present a solid front to reassure members that somehow, they’ve got the digital future solved.
I’d still love to talk to them about it. Even if the executives really don’t have answers, that’s a better start than pretending they do and the mess that continues to make.
Postscript: Just saw that Dave Zatz is in the same situation if he wants to quote himself.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
So if the intention is to turn information into a commodity that’s suitable to be sold by online vending machines, maybe it’s time for them to pay the sources that provide them quotes? You could create your own online form to sell them your quotes wholesale.
…and If I’ll buy your quote from AP, will you get your revenue share?
)
The form is stupid, it’s a simple word counter form which can take card payments. It wouldn’t be so bad but since this creates legal documents regarding copyright, you’d expect them to search a database of their own articles to see if it was actually theirs.
As someone mentioned over on SlashDot, put some lyrics in there, buy the rights and let the RIAA and AP fight it out over who ‘owns’ the content haha
“Solution? Getting out of the AP ivory tower and having a frank dialog …”
Danny, you’re kidding (well, you should be kidding). Right now, the AP is in the situation like the old joke where if their participant walked on water, bloggers would rant “THEY CAN’T SWIM!!!”
I mean, we’re basically seeing something not too far from that now. Dialog does not happen on the Internet. He or she who gets the most attention, wins (no offense intended).
This is a very common practice in the publishing industry. We’ve had to pay to post bylined articles on our website. Articles we wrote! With all the changes in media its seems like there should be some sharing allowed to those who help drive eyeballs to their sites. Radio and TV shows can play other peoples audio and video as long as they give them credit. Time for the print/web industry to catch up
Clearly the AP owns the full text of articles, but fair use means you can excerpt part of the article, with attribution, and use it in your own article. I don’t know if AP is planning to sue everyone who quotes their articles, because they certainly would lose in most cases (assuming a decent defense). I think everyone with a blog should be quoting AP sources under fair use guidelines left and right and waiting for a lawsuit. Ultimately the AP will either have to abandon these mindless policies or start suing, and I hold out hope that the courts will toss them out on their ears. Especially when the defendants turn up with AP articles that quote Reuters articles, TV and Radio broadcasts, blogger, etc. and ask the AP how much they paid for the right to use those quotes.
“It really hard to tell whether (Bartz) just thinks Yahoo isn’t that strong in search or whether she thinks she needs to jettison search to save the company”
What if I quote the AP on your blog ? Do I have to pay or do the blog owner has to (according to AP)?
If so, that means the blog owner will need to double check that no one is quoting the AP in his/her comments. Clearly not feasible…
“But to quote what I told the AP, I have to pay them $17.50.” – This is crazy.. hehehe
Perhaps you should give them 20 words for free over the phone, then stop mid-sentence until they fork out money on a word-for-word basis.
Hey Danny, this sounds as good deal, you charge them $100 for quoting you and then pay the $17 fee, naah i was just kidding. It’s absurd what they are doing really.