18 Jun 2008
“A number of bloggers I respect a great deal didn’t find the A.P.’s openness to their ideas to be enough and have declared war on it. As someone who is both a blogger and an employee of a mainstream news organization, I worry that this hotheaded response is part of what gives blogs a bad name. And it doesn’t reflect the complexity of the underlying questions, which can be traced back to when the telegraph was the revolutionary technology of the day.”
He continues…
“A key part of the legal question here, and probably the ethical one too, is whether by using its material, a Web site inhibits the A.P.’s ability to earn money from its work. Several lawyers suggested to me that the A.P. may have a hard time proving how a few paragraphs in a blog represents real harm. Most blogs aren’t reporting news in direct competition with the A.P.; they are commenting on the news or offering a place to discuss news. Some sites, and this gets a tad dicey, are mainly about presenting lists of links to articles that the blogger, or the members of a community, find interesting. I’ll bet there are users who go to a site like Digg, rather than an A.P. client like Yahoo News, to find out what’s going on in the world. Still, if enough people click on links from these sites back to the sites of the A.P. clients who publish its articles, value is being created for the A.P., not destroyed.”
It’s the blogosphere vs the AP. Not surprisingly, the AP is already back-peddling.
