The Associated Press Goes Completely Mental - Sun, Jul 26 2009 at 12:08 am
Ever since the OBR started back in 1999, we’ve being trying to bring fans the latest Browns news, regardless of whether we broke the info first or whether it broke elsewhere.
When we first started the OBR Newswire back then, it was sort of a radical concept, pre-Google. Surf the ‘net relentlessly and rely on email and other tools to track headlines and shuffle the news to Browns fans. Long before most sites supported RSS, we had written our own spiders that pulled Browns headlines off of other sites and routed them into private RSS feeds for the OBR staff. As the web moves more and more to real-time search engines, we’ll be working on new ways to continue to speed the delivery of Browns news to the most dedicated fans on the web.
Unless, of course, the Associated Press gets its way.
The consortium yesterday announced an ambitious plan to lock up their content in an iron box, preventing its dissemination almost in its entirety.
As a guy who runs a small business where our content is ripped off frequently, both overtly on message boards and with more subtlety elsewhere, I can understand the desire to protect content. Another reporter ripping off our premium stories and posting them as their own, or bloggers or forum users outside the OBR lifting the content and reposting it is basically the equivalent of breaking into my home and the homes of the writers who depend on the OBR for income. So, I can understand the need to protect it.
The problem with the AP’s approach is that they want to take it to the extent that headline links and short excepts typically considered “Fair Use” will be taken off the table as well. If you look at our Newswire, we’ve linked stories for years, and include the headline and one or two sentences. Lots of fans have clicked through those links over the years, just like they now click through similar links on blogs and some of the AP’s customers today.
While the AP is targeting news “aggregators” (think “Google News”), if successful, they’ll take out bloggers and drown the internet with lawyers.
Moreover, the AP’s technology plan for protecting their content can be easily nuked by any number of pirating schemes. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to drop as much complexity as possible on the internet:
The AP’s scheme is beyond idiotic from both the business and technical standpoint. But at least it has provided some humor value and gives JRod the ability to demand the price of a beer from me for posting a link to their blog on the same subject:
Sometimes you just have to shake your head at what gets produced by big thinkers hiring busloads of consultants. This is one of those times.
None of this surprises me. A regular on my internet show went to work for Quicken Loans. In his work agreement, he was told he had to stop participating on Moohead Radio. He made the mistake of using me as a reference. The damn work agreement mentioned the show by name. If it’s not the proprietary nature of business, it’s attempted media manipulation by teams. I’ve been doing this crap for far too long, and the AP is just the latest company to attempt to cut off bloggers at the knees. Somebody there is trying to flex their muscles. They will only hurt themselves when people cannot find their stories anywhere except their own sites and a few paid corporate sites. Nobody controls the internet. It is the primary reason I decided on an entertainment based approach rather than a news based show. Everybody wants the scoop, and no one cares about the public getting the story. That’s the profile of today’s media moguls.
Marc Steenbarger
Resident Bovine