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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jun
17
(2008)
I’m not sure what to make of this. According to the Associated Press,
The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.
And they provide commercial (and even educational) licenses for purchase so people can legitimately use content published by the Associated Press.
But what of fair use? I’m honestly not sure what to make of this – can the AP demand a fee for a quote using as little as 5 words? Did I break the law by citing one sentence above? Did I need to pay $17.50 to pay for quoting one sentence of an article, while providing proper attribution? According to their site, anything resembling fair use is described as “piracy” – that can’t be right. They do offer a “free web post” version – as long as I am comfortable with only using the quote for a limited time, and will let the AP post their ads on my site. That’s not “free”. Here are the options they provide for “reuse”:
If you qualify for educational pricing, that’s $12.50 you owe AP. If you don’t, make that $17.00.
The fact that you host your site yourself might hinder your ability to qualify for those low, low educational prices. After all, is this blog “solely” for educational use? Then again, it’s probably best that you are hosting your site yourself, As the AP notes, “Piracy hurts creators, devalues their works, and puts you and *your employer* at risk.”
I also see I ‘may’ be eligible for ‘up to’ a cool million bucks in reward if I rat you out. Might ‘digital rights bounty hunters’ be the hot new employment trend in the coming decade?
http://info.icopyright.com/honorcopyright.asp
…or, I could rat D’Arcy out, give him a portion of the million bucks to pay his fines. ThenI could publish some AP stuff, he could rat me out, share the bounty to pay the fines, reap the profits….the fun would never end! Think of all the money we could make simply by re-posting canned, stale-dated articles from AP, almost like my local newspaper!
Jeez, this totally beats the multi-level marketing scam I was trying to get started…
RE: “can the AP demand a fee for a quote using as little as 5 words?”
Sure, they can demand anything they want. Does the law say that they can they force you to pay them? Different question entirely.
Short answer: they have a lot of money for a lot of lawyers, and some of their recent actions show that they are more than willing to flex some legal muscle on your copyright-violating ass!
It get’s even cloudier in your case, because you are Canadian, and your blog is in Canada, and, while (obviously) IANAL, legal interpretations differ between Canada and Les Etats Unis.
@Brian — I’ll gladly rat him out with you — can we split the million?
The problem about AP is that they are situated in USA. In the US you are not entitled to get your lawyer fees covered even if you win. Therefore a frivolious lawsuit, disregarding the fair use part of the law, is enough to shut people up. A lawyer in the US doesn’t com cheap, I hear.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080407-patry-copyright-owners-wants-rights-expanded-to-were-rabbit-size.html