Dave Winer on the Controversy with the AP
“What I learned about the controversy with the AP and some bloggers. I asked him to look at NewsJunk.com to see if it would be an infringement, he said no. This contradicts much of what people are saying on blogs. Please have a look.”
Dave discusses the controversy between bloggers and the Associated Press (AP) over the use of AP content. Dave explains that the issue arose when a blogger named Rogers Cadenhead was republishing full AP articles on his website, which the AP saw as copyright infringement. He believes the AP is right to protect its content, but suggests they should focus on large-scale infringement rather than going after smaller bloggers. He recommends the AP release a statement outlining their philosophy and approach to working with bloggers, as he believes the AP has generally been supportive of new technologies like RSS. Overall, Dave advocates for a more measured and collaborative approach between the AP and the blogging community.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Hey, good morning, everybody,
it’s Dave Winer here and this
is a special edition of Warning
Coffee Notes.
It’s been a long time since I did a podcast and I started writing something and I thought this is going to be easier to explain in a podcast than it would be in a blog post.
So that’s what I thought I would try to do. This is about the, oh, I don’t know, controversy I guess would be a good word. I don’t want to sort of minimize it or maximize it, just say controversy with the Associ ated Press. And I’ve seen a lot of stuff written on it and I know Jim Kennedy who’s vice president at AP and I know many of the other people there and I’ve worked with them on and off over the years on various projects that relate to RSS and blogging and actually have a project that I ’m working on right now that is using their content to try to develop a new area of syndication for pictures, for high-resolution pictures that relate to the news. And I’m hoping to get some of that stuff into the News Junk project soon, newsj unk. com. And so like in the conversation today I asked Jim to take a look at newsjunk.
com and to let me know what he thought whether or not that was infringing or not and whether I would be facing a lawsuit from the Associated Press.
And I didn’t think that I would , but given all the things that I’ve been reading about in the blogosphere lately that I would think that I was going to be sued by the AP if you were to take what they are trading as basic fact at face value. And so Kennedy said, “No , what we’re doing on newsjunk is perfectly appropriate and there ’s no problem. " So let me try to describe what that is . Let me get the site up here.
Just take me a second. It’s n-e-w-s-j-u-n-k. com. And so if you go through the main column you’ll see in its left most column there’s what time of day the story was posted and then there’s a headline and the headline links to the story , actually through one of our re -directors, links to the story. And then there’s a brief description. Usually no more than three sentences, most often actually just one sentence, and then an indication of what the publication is.
So the first one is a story in the New York Times site that says, “Leave the wives alone,” the candidates say. And Barack Obama and John McCain agree that their wives should be off limits and then argue about it.
And then there’s one from Mark Halpern and then there’s one from Salon, Reuters, USA Today, Campaign Stops, Reuters, USA Today, USA Today, God, there’s a lot of USA Today. Somewhere in here there’s got to be an AP article. I should say a link to an AP article. There are some. Oh, here we go. At 11. 26 a. m. Bush to Congress, Embrace Energy Exploration Now. And it says, “With gasoline topping $4 gallon, President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, saying the United States needs to increase its energy production . " Democrats quickly reject the idea. And if you went to the article, went to the link, you ’d go to hosted. ap. org. And then there would be the full article written by H. Joseph A.
Baer. And there’s a few pictures and even a little video. And then there’s a seven-day forecast for Wisconsin. I don’t know why Wisconsin, I’m not in Wisconsin, I’m in California.
Anyway. And so when Kennedy looked at this, he said it was fine. So then I asked him for the background on what had happened. And I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember the spirit of it. And basically what had happened was a blogger , it was a blogger, his name is Rodgers Cadenhead, and he runs a site that’s called the Drugs Retour at Drugs. com.
And it’s a user submission site, so people can submit their blog posts there. And they’re supposed to submit, I guess they’re supposed to submit links to stories. And what they were doing was, is they were submitting links, not just the stories, but the whole text of the story as well. And I’ve written and I said to Jim, and I believe at this moment that most people, reasonable people, would say that that is not fair , okay? That the AP, their business is licensing those stories to websites and to newspapers, so they can republish them and then, you know, do whatever, put ads on them or charge money to read them or, I don’t know, whatever. But that’s their business. And it’s a big business, it’s $715 million a year according to Kennedy. So there’s no question that that’s, in my mind, there’s no question.
Maybe you might disagree, but I don’t doubt that there’s a problem there with somebody doing that. And in fact, when people do that with my blog content, my posts, I really wish they wouldn’t, for practical reasons, not because it’s my business, because it isn’t. I don’t sell my copy, I don’t license it. But sometimes I make a correction or I add a link or add an update to a post and when you, you know, paste in the whole copy article, well, then you’re not going to be getting the updates. So it’s just, it bothers me. It goes against my sense of fairness.
There is a copyright notice on my RSS feed, which is where these things come from. And the people who are doing this are basically ignoring that copyright. No, I don’t like that. It’s not fair. If I gave my permission, then fine, you know , but I did not give my permission to do it and I don’t. So what happened was then that Katie had took down the infringing articles and they were still discussing some other stuff.
Not sure exactly what that was.
Maybe we can get the detailed information from Kate and Heather or from Robert Cox, who apparently was working with him. But then all of a sudden it’s public. And this was a surprise to Kennedy. They weren’t expecting it, that it would go public. And it just happened.
I don’t think he’s sure as to how it happened. And then they sort of communicated by talking with some reporters and stuff.
And they haven’t actually sort of grabbed a bull by the horns and said, “Let’s just get a clear statement of what we’re doing here. " And it hasn’t come from them yet. And at the same time, blotters have been going digging around and they found some form where you can submit a request to, I don ’t even know what it is.
And I asked Kennedy about it and he said that had absolutely nothing to do with blotters.
And recall, if you go back and look at NewsJoc. com, you’ll see something that Kennedy says that they think is fair. So what’s the uptake on this? Well, first of all, I recommend that they drop the matter with Kate.
Whatever it is, the issue with it is it’s one of these things that’s just too much pain involved in pursuing it.
And whatever their issue is with them, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what the concern is, but pick a different case. I mean, for one thing, they’re not interested in pursuing small websites that are run just for fun and where people are commenting on things and being part of a community and learning from each other and sharing their thoughts. They’re very clear on that. Blotters, they want to work with blotters and they want to support blot ters. And they see that blotters are like customers, they’re like users. They’re not, they ’re like, he called an audience, it’s not a word that I’m a big fan of. But what they’re worried about is people that are interfering with their business. And I think it’s fairly clear that that’s not what’s going on here. So I suggest that they drop that matter and that they only pursue infring ement that is wholesale. Where people are taking the entire article and that there’s something obviously commercial about it.
And also suggest that they make a statement of philosophy.
This is the part where I think we can all help them, is that they should make a, I know people don’t want to help them, but I got to say, I think I said this up front. They’ve been very helpful to me when I ’ve asked for, to use their content in ways that were stretching their idea of what business they’re in. They pretty much always said yes. When I asked them to do RSS, they did RSS. They were very enthusiastic supporters of the technology without fully understanding where it was going. So I’m inclined to help them. And I think that writers should too because, you know, I think because AP is part of what we do. Maybe we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them. We don’t, obviously, or, you know, and only in the negative.
But that they come out with a statement of philosophy that says this is what we, this is why we value our relationship with writers. And this is what we hope to get out of it.
So that if something like this comes up again in the future, and you’re hearing, you know, something that sounds like the AP is a demonic organization that is held bent on destroying themselves at the hands of the blogosphere, which is a lot of what you’re reading out there, that, well, if you have this statement here that says, well, we’re really about supporting the blogosphere, you say, okay, well, these things don’t seem to be in agreement. And maybe we ought to wait to hear what they say about this particular situation before we, you know, jump up and down, you know, and people like to get upset. It’s obviously something .
And I think that also people think they’re going to get flow from this. They’re, you know, it’s better, it’s easier to, it’s better to get the flow than it is to step back and say, wait a minute, let’s try to calm this down a little bit, you know, but I don’t know what I was going to say. Then I said, okay, then let’s take 30 day cooling off period and just think what is it that they want to do and what do they want to get out of this and what are the ground rules.
And then after having done something thoughtful, hopefully and you know, presenting their ideas to the blogosphere, then if it still seems as crazy as some of what is being presented, then we can have our shit storm. But I think that we’ll find when it’s also done that it isn’t that way. And I think that they make a contribution and they’re going through a tough period here. And I don’t know, I tend to get in the middle of a crowd and somebody that’s being chased down and it doesn ’t seem to matter to me if that is a huge mega corporation , albeit a nonprofit, as you mentioned, the AP is not for profit cooperative. I like these people, what can I say? So anyway, if you have some comments on this, go to script ing. com and I’ll open up a comment, throw it on the blog post.
We’ll just see where we’re at in terms of time. Yeah, we’re at 12, about 13 minutes, it’s not too bad. Anyway, so my address is scripting. com and my name is Dave Winer and thank you very much for listening. Hope you’re all having a wonderful Wednesday and take care. Okay, bye-bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
It’s been a long time since I did a podcast and I started writing something and I thought this is going to be easier to explain in a podcast than it would be in a blog post.
So that’s what I thought I would try to do. This is about the, oh, I don’t know, controversy I guess would be a good word. I don’t want to sort of minimize it or maximize it, just say controversy with the Associ ated Press. And I’ve seen a lot of stuff written on it and I know Jim Kennedy who’s vice president at AP and I know many of the other people there and I’ve worked with them on and off over the years on various projects that relate to RSS and blogging and actually have a project that I ’m working on right now that is using their content to try to develop a new area of syndication for pictures, for high-resolution pictures that relate to the news. And I’m hoping to get some of that stuff into the News Junk project soon, newsj unk. com. And so like in the conversation today I asked Jim to take a look at newsjunk.
com and to let me know what he thought whether or not that was infringing or not and whether I would be facing a lawsuit from the Associated Press.
And I didn’t think that I would , but given all the things that I’ve been reading about in the blogosphere lately that I would think that I was going to be sued by the AP if you were to take what they are trading as basic fact at face value. And so Kennedy said, “No , what we’re doing on newsjunk is perfectly appropriate and there ’s no problem. " So let me try to describe what that is . Let me get the site up here.
Just take me a second. It’s n-e-w-s-j-u-n-k. com. And so if you go through the main column you’ll see in its left most column there’s what time of day the story was posted and then there’s a headline and the headline links to the story , actually through one of our re -directors, links to the story. And then there’s a brief description. Usually no more than three sentences, most often actually just one sentence, and then an indication of what the publication is.
So the first one is a story in the New York Times site that says, “Leave the wives alone,” the candidates say. And Barack Obama and John McCain agree that their wives should be off limits and then argue about it.
And then there’s one from Mark Halpern and then there’s one from Salon, Reuters, USA Today, Campaign Stops, Reuters, USA Today, USA Today, God, there’s a lot of USA Today. Somewhere in here there’s got to be an AP article. I should say a link to an AP article. There are some. Oh, here we go. At 11. 26 a. m. Bush to Congress, Embrace Energy Exploration Now. And it says, “With gasoline topping $4 gallon, President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, saying the United States needs to increase its energy production . " Democrats quickly reject the idea. And if you went to the article, went to the link, you ’d go to hosted. ap. org. And then there would be the full article written by H. Joseph A.
Baer. And there’s a few pictures and even a little video. And then there’s a seven-day forecast for Wisconsin. I don’t know why Wisconsin, I’m not in Wisconsin, I’m in California.
Anyway. And so when Kennedy looked at this, he said it was fine. So then I asked him for the background on what had happened. And I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember the spirit of it. And basically what had happened was a blogger , it was a blogger, his name is Rodgers Cadenhead, and he runs a site that’s called the Drugs Retour at Drugs. com.
And it’s a user submission site, so people can submit their blog posts there. And they’re supposed to submit, I guess they’re supposed to submit links to stories. And what they were doing was, is they were submitting links, not just the stories, but the whole text of the story as well. And I’ve written and I said to Jim, and I believe at this moment that most people, reasonable people, would say that that is not fair , okay? That the AP, their business is licensing those stories to websites and to newspapers, so they can republish them and then, you know, do whatever, put ads on them or charge money to read them or, I don’t know, whatever. But that’s their business. And it’s a big business, it’s $715 million a year according to Kennedy. So there’s no question that that’s, in my mind, there’s no question.
Maybe you might disagree, but I don’t doubt that there’s a problem there with somebody doing that. And in fact, when people do that with my blog content, my posts, I really wish they wouldn’t, for practical reasons, not because it’s my business, because it isn’t. I don’t sell my copy, I don’t license it. But sometimes I make a correction or I add a link or add an update to a post and when you, you know, paste in the whole copy article, well, then you’re not going to be getting the updates. So it’s just, it bothers me. It goes against my sense of fairness.
There is a copyright notice on my RSS feed, which is where these things come from. And the people who are doing this are basically ignoring that copyright. No, I don’t like that. It’s not fair. If I gave my permission, then fine, you know , but I did not give my permission to do it and I don’t. So what happened was then that Katie had took down the infringing articles and they were still discussing some other stuff.
Not sure exactly what that was.
Maybe we can get the detailed information from Kate and Heather or from Robert Cox, who apparently was working with him. But then all of a sudden it’s public. And this was a surprise to Kennedy. They weren’t expecting it, that it would go public. And it just happened.
I don’t think he’s sure as to how it happened. And then they sort of communicated by talking with some reporters and stuff.
And they haven’t actually sort of grabbed a bull by the horns and said, “Let’s just get a clear statement of what we’re doing here. " And it hasn’t come from them yet. And at the same time, blotters have been going digging around and they found some form where you can submit a request to, I don ’t even know what it is.
And I asked Kennedy about it and he said that had absolutely nothing to do with blotters.
And recall, if you go back and look at NewsJoc. com, you’ll see something that Kennedy says that they think is fair. So what’s the uptake on this? Well, first of all, I recommend that they drop the matter with Kate.
Whatever it is, the issue with it is it’s one of these things that’s just too much pain involved in pursuing it.
And whatever their issue is with them, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what the concern is, but pick a different case. I mean, for one thing, they’re not interested in pursuing small websites that are run just for fun and where people are commenting on things and being part of a community and learning from each other and sharing their thoughts. They’re very clear on that. Blotters, they want to work with blotters and they want to support blot ters. And they see that blotters are like customers, they’re like users. They’re not, they ’re like, he called an audience, it’s not a word that I’m a big fan of. But what they’re worried about is people that are interfering with their business. And I think it’s fairly clear that that’s not what’s going on here. So I suggest that they drop that matter and that they only pursue infring ement that is wholesale. Where people are taking the entire article and that there’s something obviously commercial about it.
And also suggest that they make a statement of philosophy.
This is the part where I think we can all help them, is that they should make a, I know people don’t want to help them, but I got to say, I think I said this up front. They’ve been very helpful to me when I ’ve asked for, to use their content in ways that were stretching their idea of what business they’re in. They pretty much always said yes. When I asked them to do RSS, they did RSS. They were very enthusiastic supporters of the technology without fully understanding where it was going. So I’m inclined to help them. And I think that writers should too because, you know, I think because AP is part of what we do. Maybe we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them. We don’t, obviously, or, you know, and only in the negative.
But that they come out with a statement of philosophy that says this is what we, this is why we value our relationship with writers. And this is what we hope to get out of it.
So that if something like this comes up again in the future, and you’re hearing, you know, something that sounds like the AP is a demonic organization that is held bent on destroying themselves at the hands of the blogosphere, which is a lot of what you’re reading out there, that, well, if you have this statement here that says, well, we’re really about supporting the blogosphere, you say, okay, well, these things don’t seem to be in agreement. And maybe we ought to wait to hear what they say about this particular situation before we, you know, jump up and down, you know, and people like to get upset. It’s obviously something .
And I think that also people think they’re going to get flow from this. They’re, you know, it’s better, it’s easier to, it’s better to get the flow than it is to step back and say, wait a minute, let’s try to calm this down a little bit, you know, but I don’t know what I was going to say. Then I said, okay, then let’s take 30 day cooling off period and just think what is it that they want to do and what do they want to get out of this and what are the ground rules.
And then after having done something thoughtful, hopefully and you know, presenting their ideas to the blogosphere, then if it still seems as crazy as some of what is being presented, then we can have our shit storm. But I think that we’ll find when it’s also done that it isn’t that way. And I think that they make a contribution and they’re going through a tough period here. And I don’t know, I tend to get in the middle of a crowd and somebody that’s being chased down and it doesn ’t seem to matter to me if that is a huge mega corporation , albeit a nonprofit, as you mentioned, the AP is not for profit cooperative. I like these people, what can I say? So anyway, if you have some comments on this, go to script ing. com and I’ll open up a comment, throw it on the blog post.
We’ll just see where we’re at in terms of time. Yeah, we’re at 12, about 13 minutes, it’s not too bad. Anyway, so my address is scripting. com and my name is Dave Winer and thank you very much for listening. Hope you’re all having a wonderful Wednesday and take care. Okay, bye-bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]