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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Old Media Tries to Sue to Keep Old Paradigm (again)


With newspapers failing right and left, the Associated Press decided the best way to fight the web is to sue it. Sounds like the record industry and we all know how well that turned out...

The Associated Press board voted recently to "pursue legal and legislative actions" against aggregators who use content without permission, a new shot across the bow of internet news sites in the war over how little use is "fair use."

According to the article AP to Aggregators: We Will Sue You they want companies like Google who only show a headline or two to pay.

According to an article called A.P. to Take On Web Aggregators

One goal of The A.P. and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work of news organization.

Neither Mr. Singleton nor a statement released by the A.P. mentioned Google or any other company by name. But many news executives, including some at The A.P., have spoken about their concern that their work has become a source of revenue for Google and, to a lesser extent, other aggregators, which can sell ads on search pages and news sites that turn up articles. At a time when newspaper revenue is collapsing and some papers are closing, the prospect of getting a share of revenue from Yahoo or Google is more tempting than ever.


So, we'll see if this works better for the print industry than the record industry or publishing industry or... come on, suing people who guide traffic to your site?

I promise here not to sue anyone who links to any of my blog posts...really I won't sue you.
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2 comments:

Jane Bozarth said...

Bless their hearts.

Steve Gaydon said...

It seems like anytime there is innovation, you'll always have businesses that are going to suffer. The internet has hurt the music industry (the CD burner), the television industry (online episodes mean lower live ratings) and now the newspaper industry. With the popularity of online news sites, several newspapers and magazine are seeing their revenue decline. I just canceled my USAToday subscription because they raised the copy price to $1.00. I said to myself "Why should I continue to pay this increased price when I can just read any important news story online?" Instead of pointing fingers and making lawyers rich, news sources and publishers need to come up with a profitable model that will take advantage of this innovation. Just think of all the paper and ink that will be conserved.