According to the AP, this Post Should Cost Me Over $60

In an attempt to demonstrate just how absurd the AP’s new plan is for charging bloggers who want to quote five words from an article $12.50, I present to you what the AP would like to charge more than $60 for me to share with you:

“is good for the economy” – LINK

“didn’t approve the full amount sought” – LINK

“believed to have been arrested”  LINK

“engaged in tit-for-tat attacks, but”  LINK (note: unclear on charge for hyphenated words…)

“World War II may be over”  LINK

Yup, I certainly feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth.  You?

AP Accelerating It’s Own Demise with Misguided Plans

Today’s blogs are all afire writing about the latest twist in the AP’s comical and borderline pathetic attempts to shore up its broken and obsolete business model: charging outrageous fees to anyone looking to quote FIVE WORDS OR MORE from an AP article.

Should you read an AP article and want to quote it in a blog post you are asked to click on a “copyright use” link that leads you to this:

Now, I don’t want to guess what the AP thinks it can charge me for using this image.  The fact is, just because they charge doesn’t change the principle of “fair use” and this image is being used so that I can critique it’s absurdity.

The bigger problem, if you are the AP, is that everything about this policy is counter to the way information is consumed and shared in the modern, digital age.  The AP can bitch and moan all they want to about the “good old days” but that doesn’t make time move backwards.

As the ability for people to  both gather and distribute news around the globe grows, the question is not what will the AP do in some misguided attempt to protect its work from being shared but why do we really need the AP at all.  If the AP disappeared tomorrow news would continue to be reported and most people wouldn’t notice anything had happened.

That’s not a good sign for the AP.

Related articles by Zemanta

• I for one welcome AP’s war on links and fair use (inquisitr.com)
• By The AP’s Own Logic, The AP Ripped Off Obama (techdirt.com)
• Quote 5 Words From the Associated Press? That’ll Be $12.50 (mashable.com)

AP to Place “DRM” on the News

In what I am betting is one of the AP’s final death throes, the organization has come up with a far-ranging plan that they claim will stop the rampant theft and plagiarism of their content and will finally force us freeloaders to make micropayments to read the news.

PaidContent parsed their FAQ:

—The registry will use a microformat platform AP developed; it was endorsed by the London-based Media Standards Trust earlier this month.

—The “microformat” puts content in content in a “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework “that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.”

—The registry will provide metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support.

—AP says the registry could support its previous idea of building search pages as “authoritative sources” by requiring links “to search optimized news pages that guide users to timely, authoritative coverage. AP continues to research the concept.”

Is it just me or does this sound an awful lot like the awful DRM that plagued the music business until only extremely recently.  While the music labels have all but completely abandoned DRM, realizing it did nothing to curb policy and a lot to piss off customers, it looks like the AP is going to give the same failed effort a spin.

It’s sad to see how little the various major content industries have been able to learn  from each others’ mounting failures.

AOL Could Be King on Online “Magazines”

There is a very smart, clear, article in TBI that looks at one of the cornerstones of AOL’s plans now that they’ve been spun back off of Time Warner:

The model goes something like this: Find a vertical with an audience attractive to advertisers, brand it (Daily Finance, Asylum, Lemondrop, Politics Daily), hire five to seven people to run it and plug in AOL’s traffic fire hose. Repeat.

It’s not like isn’t being done by others. Nick Denton’s mini-empire has a very similar model and, guess what, it remains profitable while the traditional dead-tree magazines are dropping like so many flies.  The main reason to think AOL might succeed here is that they are building a digital-age system from the ground up, not trying to shoehorn an old business model into a new universe.

They’re the antithesis of the kind of quality standards Time Inc. and Condé Nast tout, relying largely on aggregation, blogging and traffic-goosing tricks such as provocative slide shows. But unlike the print publications trying to port their cost structure to the web, these publications can be cash-positive from the start. In fact, one could argue these sites cropping up represent today’s version of the magazine launch — after the old, splashy kind died with Portfolio.

And, as TBI finally points out:

Then you’ve got an economic environment tailor-made to building this business. Traditional magazines are in disarray, talent is cheap, and audiences are splintering and accepting of new brands. AOL has more than 300 people producing these sites in New York and has contracts with about the same number of freelancers. In the past six months, AOL has hired more than 50 journalists from places such as the Associated Press, Washington Post and USA Today.

If you are looking for the future of news, you might get a good idea by paying some attention to that old internet warhorse, AOL.

Let’s just hope they don’t starting sending out those damn CD-ROM’s again.