No News Today

Who 'owns' the news?

Should it have an 'owner' at all?

What allowances should be granted for fair use?

These are the questions that news proprietors have been mulling over since the explosive use of the Internet from the late 1990s.

After long resisting putting any news service online, all newspaper publishers have realised now that people expect their information for 'free' and that they're happy to put up with advertisements - after all, that's the revenue model that free-to-air TV viewers have experienced for years.

In fact, just this week, Channel 9 patted itself on the back for webcasting its 6pm news free of charge.

However the Associated Press begs to differ.

The blogosphere is abuzz with news that AP is charging bloggers for excerpting its stories.

Here's the price scale - and yes, it was taken without payment to AP.

Excerpt for Web Use
License parts of this article for republishing on your website or intranet. Pricing based on the number of words excerpted.

Excerpts are priced by the word.
Words Fees
5-25 $ 12.50
26-50 $ 17.50
51-100 $ 25.00
101-250 $ 50.00
251 and up $ 100.00

No one questions that the Associated Press owns the copyright on its stories (as all media outlets assert) and most people referencing these stories are more than happy to link back to the original source. As we do here on the Business Communications Management blog.

But to suggest that someone actually own information in the public interest or public domain sets a very dangerous precedent.

The decision by AP to charge Internet users by the word for excerpting their stories is bizarre in the extreme, particularly when readers are encouraged to share these articles through news aggregation sites such as Digg and Newsvine as well as via automated syndicated feeds, called RSS, provided free by news web sites.

Here is a link to a news item from April which appears on the News.com.au web site which illustrates this.

Moreover, AP should be encouraging the syndication of its stories to web sites and newsblogs as long as there is a link back to the site because it drives traffic and increases the profile of the site and provides value to potential advertisers.

Most people understand what fair use is and appreciate that the wholesale lifting of material without attribution is plagiarism.

In other fair use news, the producers of the US documentary, Expelled won a lawsuit filed by Yoko Ono over their use of an extract from the John Lennon song Imagine.

The producers successfully argued that their 15 second segment of the song was fair use within the context of the documentary.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein ruled that if the case went to court, the filmmakers would probably win under the fair use doctrine.

"That doctrine provides that the fair use of a copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism and commentary is not an infringement of copyright," Stein wrote in his decision in Manhattan federal court.

And just a note of irony here, the link and extract comes from an Associated Press story carried by Yahoo - and that's supposed to be $25 worth.

UPDATE: AP quotes from blogs, doesn't offer to pay.