The A.P. Has Violated My Copyright, And I Demand Justice
[Quote:]
As far as I can tell, the Associated Press is sticking by its ridiculous and unlawful assertion that “direct quotations, even short ones” are copyright infringements and result in lawsuit threats and DMCA takedown notices.
This story led us to ban the A.P., call the New York Times out on undisclosed conflicts of interest and begin to investigate some ridiculous organization called the Media Bloggers Association before getting bored and wandering off to other topics.
But now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).
Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.
June 21st, 2008 at 3:45
Ha. It’s fair use either way, so long as either one of you are using it for critical, satirical, reference, blah, blah, blah purposes. The problem is if you quote an AP story, AP bills you, and you refuse to pay AP, they sue you, you still have to defend it. A general denial followed by a clearly written motion requesting summary dismissal on the grounds of clear fair use, citing a couple precedents, should, I think, do it with something like this. But a lot of bloggers won’t even know what a “general denial” is, so they’re going to have to pay an attorney thousands of dollars to make it go away. I really doubt AP is going to go after a lot of unpaid $12.50 bills since the filing fees on the cases alone will exceed the amount of the bill; but their outside counsel will love them for it if they do.
What would probably be more fun, and perhaps even effective, is rather than not quote AP, or bill them for quoting you, is get a bunch of high-traffic, heavily read blogs together and post references to AP stories, without links, intentionally misinterpreting the AP story. For example, AP wires a story that includes the quotation, “A recent poll of registered Pennsylvania voters who self-report as likely to vote in the November general election places Senator Obama 12 points ahead of Senator McCain. The margin of error in the poll is +/-…” Write it as, “An Associated Press wire story today reported that a poll in shows Senator McCain 21 points ahead of Senator Obama in the important ’swing state’ of Pennsylvania. So, looks like Associated Press has made it pretty clear McCain has Pennsylvania locked up, as though numbers could change, if that lead is anywhere near accurate, it’s pretty much insurmountable for Obama.”
Keep that up long enough, in enough popular blogs, they’ll be PAYING bloggers to quote them VERBATIM instead of merely reporting on their reporting. It will annoy the hell out of them, people calling and emailing to ask them just what the Schenectady they think they’re talking about. Since you provide no link in your story, and the nature of the Internet is that people will just remember “AP says” and very few people bother to actually source things on the Internet even by one degree of abstratction, anyway, it actually stands a chance, or they will perceive it stands a chance, of eroding their credibility as a wire service.
June 21st, 2008 at 8:59
All you say is true, but you’re forgetting one thing: AP is using the DMCA to get the stories removed. Or perhaps I should say abuse. The legal process is very different in that case, because such a takedown notice starts with ‘on penalty of perjury…’ So it isn’t just billing, or getting a “general denial”. Apart from the great misquoting method you mention, getting one of them to admit they know it’s fair use, would theoretically mean jail time. That should work pretty well as a deterrent, but it has never been done for a DMCA notice. It would take a lot of power out of the DMCA if even once a lawyer for a large company like AP would sit in a cell for a few hours.