The Associated Press Sucks Eggs

It’s war.  The AP has declared war. 


Tom Curley, The A.P.’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 A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., 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.

Screw fair use.  The hell with dissemination of information.  I wonder if Curley cleared this with the rest of the brain trust, Moe, Larry and Shemp?

The AP wants its piece of the pie, and it will no longer tolerate people like me taking so much as a headline without compensation.  But how will it know that the evil Greenfield is linking to its stories for my own evil purposes?


Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.
No longer will a scoundrel like me fly under the radar of newsgathering giants.  I don’t know that I will be AP Enemy Number 1, but I could be in the top 100.  Okay, maybe the top 10,000.  But I will still be an enemy, undone by the secret, hidden tracking thingies in the news.

But I have a plan to foil the AP and continue my nefarious scheme for world hegemony.  I will simply make absolutely no profit whatsoever from Simple Justice.  Hah! They can have their piece of my pie any time they want.  And they can starve from it.  Just like I do.

Give me a break.  People like me send readers to their stories, rather than the other way around.  There’s no gain in it for me.  In the event that Simple Justice becomes a multi-billion dollar business, I will re-evaluate.  Until then, bite me.

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9 thoughts on “The Associated Press Sucks Eggs”

  2. Deborah

    I so enjoy your commentaries. You knowledge and insight of the law and other timely issues is more helpful to the ‘layman’ than you can ever know. This one makes me ‘smile’. Thank you for being you.

  5. Doug

    You also forgot about Joe Besser and Curly Joe Derita. I am sure that they also would have been in the loop on this decision.

  6. SHG

    Yeah right.  Like the kids on the internet will remember that there were two Curlys.  I thought I was going a bit too long by even referencing the stooges.

  7. Rob

    Oh, a wise guy!

    As the webmaster of ThreeStooges.net, I have to take exception to the implication that the Three Stooges were as stupid as the A.P. management. That’s clearly an insult to the Stooges!

  9. Charlie

    Someone should ask Tom Curley why the revenue buck should stop with the AP. After all don’t the people who participated in making the news deserve a cut? Like say the victims of violence they have reported on or the death of a young US Marine that they sensationlazed behind the vailed cowardice of “a larger story”?

    Tom like the old saying goes,”live by the sword die by the sword”. In your case the sword is greed. We can see right through your hidden agenda.

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