AP Wants Information to Be Caged
It’s really hard for me to understand how the AP’s new initiative is supposed to work. Their concern, they say, is that “a significant amount of AP news and news from AP members is used without permission or fair compensation.” This appears under a banner about “Protecting AP’s Intellectual Property.” But neither AP nor anyone else has intellectual property in news. Factual information isn’t subject to copyright.
Ellen Barry and The New York Times have some intellectual property in the specifics of her April 11 article “Protests Wane in Moldova as Vote Recount Is Announced” but the fact that protests are waning in Moldova as vote recount is announced is just out and about. Obviously, this has always posed something of a problem for the news business. Neither Barry nor the NYT can capture the full value of the reporting about Moldova. But this is genuinely intrinsic to the whole process. The point of having a reporter write about what’s happening in Moldova is for people to learn about what’s happening in Moldova. Those people, once they know, are free to pass that information on, verbally or in writing. The mitigating factor here is that producers of news content are also able to take advantage of this dynamic. Barry writes, for example, that “The authorities, as well as local and Russian news media, have cast the protests as an attempt to violently overthrow the government.”
Thus news has been taken from Moldovan and Russian circles and recycled to NYT readers without anyone paying a fee. How could this be stopped? Why would you want it to?
28 Responses to “AP Wants Information to Be Caged”
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April 11th, 2009 at 11:31 am
I think the most AP can halt is cut-and-paste.
Since the news business, unlike academia, does not have a plagiarism police I don’t see how a simple rewrite can be attacked.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:33 am
If you want to twist their tails, simply write “AP reports that …. “
April 11th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Although I have a haunting fear that Congress will pass a law giving itself a copyright on all reports of the crimes and thievery it commits.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:39 am
That AP page you link to doesn’t say anything; after reading the page I know that they have some inchoate desire to protect their intellectual property, but I already knew that. What it means in concrete terms is still a complete mystery to me.
I preferred their effort a year or so ago to copyright the English language (they declared that any blogger using any phrase five words or longer also found in an AP article owed them royalties, which as I recall started in the several tens of dollars per incident; but the AP publishes an awful lot of words, including five-word-phrases as commonly used as “President of the United States”).
April 11th, 2009 at 11:41 am
The point is verbatim copying of text, not news.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:54 am
What’s really fascinating is how Lulu –the on-demand publisher in Raleigh, North Carolina — is undermining the New York publishing business.
Instead of an author having to spend months dicking with an agent, negotiating with a close-knit publishing world and seeing the fruits of his work taken by rent-collecting middlemen, the author can now upload his book to a server, announce it is for sale, and a printer will print copies as the orders come in. No more shadow censorship or pandering to the publishers’ prejudices, either.
FerFal, the Argentinian I mentioned before who blogged about techniques for surviving an economic collapse (based on his experiences in Buenos Aires after their collapse in 2001), just published his book on those techniques on Lulu. The readers of his blog are a specialized community but they are spread around the world.
Evidently, Lulu will handle the traditional publisher’s services of publicity, advertising, etc if the author wants to pay additional, but it is not required. If the community of interest already knows the author, then the Internet suffices.
I myself am thinking about publishing a book on foreign policy — titled “Heads in the ..er..Dirt”.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:55 am
PS It’s only “vanity publishing” if you don’t turn a profit.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
The other interesting thing about Lulu is its speed and timeliness, which is especially important in books on political affairs.
By the time books on a particular subject come out from the traditional publishing world, they have lost their relevance. Because the topic they address is no longer front page news.
Business books have a similar problem — anybody want to buy a book on how to make money speculating in real estate?
April 11th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Who pays the Moldovans for waning their protests? They, after all, are the fundamental source of this bit of news. And what’s to prevent them from pretending to restart their protests, just in order to rewane them? The real news is that the incentives are such that the Moldovans are naturally led to churning the news they make!
April 11th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Factual information may not be subject to copyright, but that doesn’t mean that firms can engage in unfair competition with impunity. The famous case in this area is International News Service v. Associated Press. In short, International News Service was barred from copying AP news stories and distributing them itself. Read the opinion here.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
@8 – Books on how to make money speculating in real estate may be inherently suspect, but assuming there are good ones, I’d much rather have one now than 2-3 years ago. The fact that such books were popular during the bubble doesn’t mean that they were particularly timely or useful during the bubble. On the contrary, the time to buy real estate is when prices are low.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Re minderbender’s comment “Factual information may not be subject to copyright, but that doesn’t mean that firms can engage in unfair competition with impunity.”
———————
Oh give me a fucking break.
One of the richest motherfuckers in the USA is an Israeli billionaire named Haim Saban. Saban was the Democratic Party’s biggest donor in the 2000-2002 cycle –dumping $14 Million into the party to support his advocacy for Israel. One of the reasons we are in Iraq is because Haim BOUGHT a Middle East policy think tank at Brookings that told us in 2002 that we needed to invade before Saddam completed his nukes.
So how did Haim Saban get his billions? By selling his “intellectual capital” — the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
And what were the creative wellsprings of the Power Rangers?
Ta Da!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Rangers
“Power Rangers, a long-running American children’s television series, originated from the Japanese tokusatsu Super Sentai Series. The American producers did not simply make an English dub of the original, but rather put together a “new” production with English-speaking actors spliced in with the original Japanese footage in varying ratios. Due to the very Japanese nature of many of the Super Sentai Series’ stories and design, the American shows vary detail to appeal to a Western audience. However, they typically dub many of the action sequences featuring the characters in costume and the mecha (referred to as “Zords” in the English series).”
————
ha ha ha Read ‘em and weep, Rubes.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
@12 – Not sure what we are supposed to conclude about intellectual property policy from the fact that intellectual property has been successfully infringed in the past. All efforts to protect IP are futile? IP is inherently suspect as a concept?
And note that we are not told whether the Japanese creators of the original footage were compensated.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
From http://supersentaionline.com/
“In the eighties, Haim Saban struck a deal with Toei to gain permission to produce Zyuranger footage into an American TV Show. They spliced Amercian footage with the Zyuranger footage to created Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. Saban had the rights to adapt any Super Sentai afterwards. And continued to adapt the latest Sentai every season. Eventually Power Rangers started to follow the yearly restart formula of Sentai. When Disney aquired Power Rangers they got the rights to use all pre Zyuranger Super Sentai ( just to make sure no one else could). ”
——–
ha ha So the market for actors dressed in bright color tights and whose lines consist of “Red Power” “Green Power” etc is all sewed up.
And we want our NEWS treated this way?
April 11th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
The more things change…. Associated Press v. International News Service, 248 U.S. 215 (1918)
April 11th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
This is one reason I found it so strange that NOM could force everyone to pull down the audition tapes for their recent ads. The audition tapes were being distributed to provide information about the development of the ads, and I don’t understand how they have rights to squelch that. I’m no intellectual property expert, but since Matt’s interested in these issues, I’d like to hear his take on it.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
@13: Not sure what we are supposed to conclude about intellectual property policy from the fact that intellectual property has been successfully infringed in the past. All efforts to protect IP are futile? IP is inherently suspect as a concept?
That’s precisely what you’re supposed to conclude because IP is inherently suspect as a concept. I realize everyone calls it “property” and in America, you’re a communist if you want to “take” someone’s “property”. Intellectual “property” has few of the characteristics of physical property – a car, a pen, your t-shirt, a piece of land. It’s not rivalrous – my use of Metric’s music does not diminish another possessor’s use. It can be duplicated at extremely low cost.
Look, if tomorrow there was a button that magically duplicated carrots or pieces of meat or buckets of water without affecting the original and at extremely low cost bordering on 0, NO ONE, except the producers of carrots, beef, and water, would complain about having massive quantities of this to feed the world.
Maybe the producers would lobby congress to have that magic button used only after paying them royalties, etc. But of course, everyone not in the pockets of the producers of carrots, meat, and buckets of water would see such a law requiring payment of royalties for the stupidity it is.
The only legitimate argument against no protections for IP is that we wouldn’t have content creators, like Metric, or Disney making stuff. Well that is belied by history: through thousands of years of history without any kind of IP protection, culture existed, flourished, whatever.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
It seems to me the key to successful news business has always been to identify for people the stories that are interesting to them and to deliver that news to them. The money is in matching people who care about the vote recount in Moldova with the information about the recount in Moldova. There seems to be a lot of reporters/news organizations who don’t understand that when they are writing a story they are only part of this matchmaking process and that if the matchmaking process can happen without them then they aren’t doing anything useful.
April 11th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I have a property interest in everything said about me.
April 11th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
The issue MY raises, it seems to me, is whether there is any intrinsic property right in “hot news.” That’s an issue raised in a famous Supreme Court case, International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918). A good summary of the case’s holding (and its recent application in a district court case) is available here: http://www.bingham.com/Media.aspx?MediaID=8374. The full opinion can be read here: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=248&invol=215.
Holmes’s dissent is the most interesting part of the opinion, though. Basically, it says there is no intrinsic property right in “hot news” (or in anything else) even though money and time has been expended in creating it, because property rights are creations of law. The dissent reads:
When an uncopyrighted combination of words is published there is no general right to forbid other people repeating them — in other words, there is no property in the combination or in the thoughts or facts that the words express. Property, a creation of law, does not arise from value, although exchangeable — a matter of fact. Many exchangeable values may be destroyed intentionally without compensation. Property depends upon exclusion by law from interference, and a person is not excluded from using any combination of words merely because some one has used it before, even if it took labor and genius to make it. If a given person is to be prohibited from making the use of words that his neighbors are free to make, some other ground must be found. One such ground is vaguely expressed in the phrase, “unfair trade.” This means that the words are repeated by a competitor in business in such a way as to convey a misrepresentation that materially injures the person who first used them, by appropriating credit of some kind, which the first user has earned. The ordinary case is a representation by device, appearance, or other indirection that the defendant’s goods come from the plaintiff. But the only reason why it is actionable to make such a representation is that it tends to give the defendant an advantage in his competition with the plaintiff and that it is thought undesirable that an advantage should be gained in that way. Apart from that, the defendant may use such unpatented devices and uncopyrighted combinations of words as he likes. The ordinary case, I say, is palming off the defendant’s product as the plaintiff’s, but the same evil may follow from the opposite falsehood—from saying, whether in words or by implication, that the plaintiff’s product is the defendant’s, and that, it seems to me, is what has happened here.
Fresh news is got only by enterprise and expense. To produce such news as it is produced by the defendant represents by implication that it has been acquired by the defendant’s enterprise and at its expense. When it comes from one of the great news collecting agencies like the Associated Press, the source generally is indicated, plainly importing that credit; and that such a representation is implied may be inferred with some confidence from the unwillingness of the defendant to give the credit and tell the truth. If the plaintiff produces the news at the same time that the defendant does, the defendant’s presentation impliedly denies to the plaintiff the credit of collecting the facts and assumes that credit to the defendant. If the plaintiff is later in Western cities it naturally will be supposed to have obtained its information from the defendant. The falsehood is a little more subtle, the injury, a little more indirect, than in ordinary cases of unfair trade, but I think that the principle that condemns the one condemns the other. It is a question of how strong an infusion of fraud is necessary to turn a flavor into a poison. The dose seems to me strong enough here to need a remedy from the law. But as, in my view, the only ground of complaint that can be recognized without legislation is the implied misstatement, it can be corrected by stating the truth; and a suitable acknowledgment of the source is all that the plaintiff can require. I think that within the limits recognized by the decision of the Court the defendant should be enjoined from publishing news obtained from the Associated Press for hours after publication by the plaintiff unless it gives express credit to the Associated Press; the number of hours and the form of acknowledgment to be settled by the District Court.
April 11th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Dear everyone pointing out International News Service v. Associated Press:
My comment to the same effect was available for everyone to read at 12:06 p.m. So why don’t you blow me?
April 11th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
In 20 years the now old cry from 96 that information wants to be free will seem grandly Utopian. Less and less information or anything will be free then and in another 20 years less again.
Everything that doesn’t have a price is being and will continue to be fought, discounted or destroyed. Freedom is capitalism but capitalism only values price.
Freedom does not exist when things are free. The AP is struggling with this existential capitalistic dilemma on behalf of all capital. They will get it all worked out.
April 11th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Who pays the Moldovans for waning their protests? They, after all, are the fundamental source of this bit of news. And what’s to prevent them from pretending to restart their protests, just in order to rewane them? The real news is that the incentives are such that the Moldovans are naturally led to churning the news they make!
April 11th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Rather than disappearing into the weeds of 90-year-old Supreme Court cases, I would simply point out that the Associated Press’ problems with the Internet have very little to do with unlicensed content providers blatantly stealing AP stories and palming them off as their own.
Their problem is that non-newspaper Internet sources have commoditized their legally licensed AP content so well that they have diminished the value of the AP franchise to its member newspapers (AP being technically a cooperative effort of all the news providers that are its members). That brings us to the recent phenomenon of member newspapers complaining about AP’s rates on the one hand, while on the other hand cutting back on the amount of stuff they use from the AP on the grounds that “people see this stuff on the Web.”
April 11th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Nelotsky!
April 12th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I still don’t think that the news should be covered by intellectual property protection. I learned a lot from this episode of The Joan Kenley Show: The Media: What’s True, What’s Not It had a couple guests (Normon Solomon from the Institute of Public Accuracy, and Peter B. Collins the broadcaster) on talking about the media and how highly paid media journalists are now compared to how they used to be. The show mentioned Sam Zell, a capitalist uninterested in the news – who borrowed $11-15 billion to become the owner of the Tribune company, which owns the L.A. Times, which has like a 40% profit margin… it makes me angry to understand how little of what I hear is true – and how it’s really just motivated by money. When I hear these stories of the AP it makes me sad to see firsthand how money shapes our information.
April 12th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
AP? Intellectual? I mean, how do they expect to copyright Republican talking points?
April 12th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Santa @26, the Tribune company that Sam Zell bought is in bankruptcy. I refer to the L. A. Times as The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper, as it sheds sections & moves more & more to the web.
I really doubt they’re making 40% on the print paper, or the Internet side.
My big worry: Will the AP again be suing non-profit (non-advertising, even) web logs like mine, where we copy & paste w/ (so far) impunity, though usually credit the AP? Is “fair use” about to go the way of the dial telephone?