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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.

- Seth Sutel, AP

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”:

I just tried to file my GST payment for the quarter, using the GST Netfile website. I figured it’d be the easiest way to do it, with the whole process taking maybe 5 minutes. I’m trying to be a responsible little consultant, filing proper papers and paying The Man to let me do it.

But, the business end of the NetFile website is actually unavailable outside of regular office hours. I don’t think they back the website with a database. It must actually fire off submissions directly to the desk of an overworked civil servant. Probably for security reasons, they don’t even hook the website up to a printer, where the pages could safely stack up in someone’s inbox. Nope. They just flash the numbers at someone in realtime. Maybe there’s a cool Wall Street ticker wrapping around the internet call centre or something.

Regardless, here’s what the website says now:

It’s comforting to know that the revenue collection system of a country with 30 million people is turned off when someone isn’t at their desk. How do they schedule potty breaks for the website monitors?

More ways to serve you, indeed.

Hello, Revenue Canada? I’m trying to give you money. Cough up for a database server already. Oh, wait. The last database built by our federal government wound up costing us over a billion dollars. Give me a shout. I’ll build you one for half that.