AP Harasses Own Member Over AP Youtube Videos 106
A reader writes "The Associated Press, who has been acting very bipolar lately about Google News (they get paid by Google for their content, and then complain about Google 'stealing' that content), has another issue with not knowing what their association is up to: they set up a channel on Youtube, and then threatened an AP affiliate for embedding that content."
Car analogy (Score:5, Funny)
You pay a parking license to go to someone's garage, and then get towed for parking in someone's garage!
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Can you rephrase that with an electronic media analogy?
Re:Car analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine that you were trying to load a station wagon full of magnetic tapes into the library of congress. And a football field full of Volkswagon Beatles filled with hard disks races around you and charges you money for the privilege. Meanwhile, the hogshead of petrol that you bought a fortnight ago is running out while you wait.
Re:Car analogy (Score:5, Funny)
WTF? (Score:1)
HUH? (Score:2, Insightful)
Signing its own death warrant (Score:5, Insightful)
None of these tactics will get people to buy more newspapers. I don't know what will, but I sure don't want Google to set a precedent for linking to asshats who can't be bothered to spend 3 minutes to edit their robots.txt if they hate it so much. But of course they won't do that. They don't want a solution, they just want money.
The problem is, as with organizations like the RIAA, once you pay them off, you just fund their lawyers to go after others who want to make use of fairuse. This is as big threat to a free internet as any national firewall or net neutrality.
Re:Signing its own death warrant (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that AP doesn't want to stop Google from indexing them, they just want to be paid more.
Re:Signing its own death warrant (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly enough, its generally the exact opposite. Companies pay to be listed in the yellow pages. White page listings are typically part of the standard phone service.
Yellow pages on the other hand are for pay listings. Its amusing that newspapers are getting pissed off that someone is giving them for free what they used to pay for.
The only thing they really have to bitch about is the fact that every one else is listed right next to them so they have to compete with other papers rather than knowing the person reading the article is probably only looking at their newspaper as it used to be.
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And of course, presenting it as an IP rights issue as the AP have done makes it seem like AP have a god-given right to that extra cash.
You mean just like the RIAA/MPAA?
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*nods* yup.
Quality of reporting is better at Reuters [reuters.com] too.
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Pete Helmes: The Marxists are denying the people of Latin America their right to eat Mr. Chicken. And, they're denying Mr. Chicken his human right to franchise and make a profit.
Scott Dantley: Well, I sure as hell don't want some made-in-Moscow Mr. Cabbage Roll shoved down my throat against my will.
Bob Nixon: Absolutely. Those peasants deserve the dignity and human right to eat Mr. Chicken when and where they please.
Pete Helmes: And Jack, when that right is threatened in the Western Hemisphere, it becomes a
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The problem is that AP doesn't want to stop Google from indexing them, they just want to be paid more.
No, they just want Google, the young whippersnappers of the media world, to get off their lawn.
Re:Signing its own death warrant (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Like I said in the AP story two days ago:
A friend of mine tells stories about her little brother, who used to hate taking a bath as a little kid, alternating between "I'm freezing!" and "It's burning my skin off!" every few seconds as excuses to try to get out of the tub.
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"I hate you!" [thud]
"I hate you.... because you're Google! [thud]
"Because you're stealing our content!" [thud]
"Because you make more money... and you've been paying us for our stories..." [thud]
"...and you bring us more traffic to our site...which increases our profits..." [thud]
"...and I really want to be more like you..." [thud]
"...and I'm really attracted to your site..." [thud]
"...and your skin is so soft..." [thud]
[thud]
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Perhaps we should extend the robots.txt format to support a price-to-index attribute.
Re:Signing its own death warrant (Score:4, Insightful)
None of these tactics will get people to buy more newspapers. I don't know what will
E-Paper readers and wireless delivery. Once the tech gets cheap enough to make a Kindle-like device "Free With Subscription" then the news media will finally catch up with the rest of the world.
And the trees will sleep a little easier at night.
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That'd be nice, although I'd like to have one reader that would accept delivery from multiple sources, rather than being required to have a "Boston Globe reader" and a separate "New York Times reader" etc.
Another alternative would be something I remember seeing in an episode of Babylon 5. Captain Sheridan went to the "Universe Today" terminal, placed yesterday's copy into a slot for recycling, and received his printed-on-demand copy (which I assume was customized to include just the sections in which he wa
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E-Paper readers and wireless delivery.
I doubt that. One of the advantages of a newspaper is its disposability. If you take it on the bus and leave it behind or it gets wet or dropped on the floor, no big deal. (Not to mention its uses for lining the bird cage and lining the floor while painting.)
Any wireless device will not have this, and I think it's a big part of the appeal of a newspaper. There's nothing there to keep track of or carry around, when you're done reading or tired of it
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E-Paper readers and wireless delivery. Once the tech gets cheap enough to make a Kindle-like device "Free With Subscription" then the news media will finally catch up with the rest of the world.
My local paper has a Twitter account [twitter.com] and posts links to new stories as they publish them online. I don't know how well it'll work out, but at least they're embracing new ideas.
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If print newspapers die, AP looses revenue unless it is able to enforce creative property rights on online formats.
Most local tv news stations and newspa
No future.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just can't see a future in these organizations suing the pants off of anyone and everyone in sight. It doesn't appear to do anyone any good, not even the rights-holders benefit in the end since they just turn themselves into litigation businesses. If this isn't a reason for far-reaching copyright reform, I don't know what is.
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If this isn't a reason for far-reaching copyright reform, I don't know what is.
True but be careful what you wish for. There are some extremely rich vested interests who would like nothing more than to be given the chance to find additional revenue streams by legal manipulation.
That's a problem with ill-gotten gains in general - they give additional financial leverage to the very people you don't want to give it to.
Contrast that with how capitalism should work - people who are most productive accumulate re
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You aren't kidding.
Contrast that with how capitalism should work - people who are most productive accumulate resources that expands their influence.
Don't you mean "expands their productivity"? Expanding influence is what we have now.
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Contrast that with how capitalism should work - people who are most productive accumulate resources that expands their influence.
Capitalism is about people with capital having the most influence. @aurispector, they may also choose to expand productivity to develop that influence but that's not necessarily the case. Consider OPEC, often they can increase their influence by lowering production of a high demand product.
Nor is capitalism about those who are the most productive. It is about those with the most capital, or other source of power, increasing their capital. Sure a by-product can be increased financial efficiency in production
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Capitalism is not necessarily harmful for society, nor is communism; in practice both are indeed deleterious due to the fact that they are always co-opted into some form of oligarchy.
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Capitalism is not necessarily harmful for society, nor is communism; in practice both are indeed deleterious due to the fact that they are always co-opted into some form of oligarchy.
To group capitalism with communism is naive in the extreme.
Uncontrolled capitalism may have deleterious aspects, but it's nothing compared to a system which essentially denies the right to personal property. Capitalism in it's simplest form, in which an entrepreneur using his profits to expand is business, harnesses an individual's self interest and ambitions and rewards initiative and effort. Communism has no such mechanism.
Communism has never been used as anything but a cover for dictatorship, and compl
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Humans are social animals. Humans have progressed from cave dwellers by working together for common goals, not by hoarding property. This is a recent invention in human history.
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You have to be kidding me. I'm certainly not advocating people take self-interest to an extreme. There's obvious benefits to cooperation and healthy market competition helps keep the excesses in check, but consider this: one guy goes out and works his ass off and hustles every day of his life while another guy sits on his ass all day. Why should we have a system where the busy guy supports the lazy guy? I don't mind paying into a system that provides support for those that can't help themselves, but whe
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And I'm quite sure you're a fucking moron. I'm sure you know it too, or you wouldn't have posted as an A/C.
How you concocted the fantasy that others support me is beyond my understanding. You may come up with some bizarre geopolitical reasons, but the fact is if I didn't work by ass off every day I'd be homeless. This is exactly how it should be.
Did I mention that you're a fucking moron?
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Anti-social? Let me paint you a picture: I'm a dentist. I took out very large student loans to become a dentist and I'll be paying them back for decades. I worked extremely hard to get through school and work extremely hard now. I'm proud to provide high quality care for my patients. I've had occasion to work in offices where the majority of patients are on welfare. Very often they're wearing nicer clothes and driving much nicer cars than I do, meaning they're lying to the state to stay on welfare.
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If you despise these welfare clients so much, why do you serve them ? I've always been of the attitude that if a client isn't worthy of your time, you should ditch them. Are you so desperate for business that you can't afford to skip bad clients ? By allowing yourself to be abused (by clients, by the state insurance system), you are perpetuating the problem for yourself and every other practitioner.
Give them an appointment 18 months away, let them bounce around until they find someone pathetic enough to
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As I said - I don't. The shame of it is that some of them are decent people that deserve help, but the system is just so broken and abused. So, I'm not quite broke, only a little bitter and genocidal only on bad days. At least I was able to exercise some choice in the matter. Now I'm merely stuck listening to adolescent idiots that think everything should be free and that taxing away half my income is a good idea.
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You don't know what you're talking about. Either that, or you've adopted a popular media definition of communism.
Now it's true that the philosophical descendants of Marx+Lenin were all dictatorial, that isn't the origin of communism. We can't really trace the origin of communism, but it predates the Roman Empire, and is probably the ancestral form of human government. The problem is that it doesn't scale. It works fine in a family. Acceptably in a small village. Poorly in a large village. And unaccept
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Communism? Regardless of it's antecedents it's Marx & Lenin we inevitably have to deal with in this day. I've read Marx and found it entirely lacking any connection to basic human motivations. Any parent of a two year old knows the concept of personal property starts early. As you say, communism fails at any scale larger than the family.
I agree that any economic system presents problems when applied in large scale. The key for capitalism is the existence of healthy free market competition. It's obvio
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The problem of energy linkage is simple:
If we run out of energy, we lose our technology. Without technology, most people will die.
The problem of labor is that automation is becoming increasingly intelligent. Cars that park themselves are already on the market. Semi-automated grocery store checkouts have begun to appear. Etc. Each such advance eliminate categories of jobs.
For some reason you also seem to think that corporations and automation will produces some sort of unholy, machine controlled dystopia. This is where you...
It think it has the potential to produce a dystopia. It also has potentials in the other direction. It all depends whether the owne
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The problem of energy linkage is simple: If we run out of energy, we lose our technology. Without technology, most people will die.
We are not anywhere near to running out of energy. The recent gas price spike spawned interest in a plethora of alternative energy technologies. Unfortunately the price of oil crashed again, but those technologies still exist. Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear are all available. When the price of energy makes them economically viable they'll come into use. Energy prices follow the law of supply and demand like everything else. Stating that everyone is going to die soon because we're running out of energy is
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"Capitalism is about people with capital having the most influence."
Not quite. I think the word you are looking for is actually "plutocracy". One could say that the latter logically follows from the former*, but that doesn't make them the same thing.
"@aurispector, they may also choose to expand productivity to develop that influence but that's not necessarily the case. Consider OPEC, often they can increase their influence by lowering production of a high demand product."
This is a critical flaw in capitalis
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I'd prepared a very humorous, insightful and engaging response and my browser arsed up on me .. so this'll have to do.
"Capitalism is about people with capital having the most influence."
Not quite. I think the word you are looking for is actually "plutocracy". One could say that the latter logically follows from the former*, but that doesn't make them the same thing.
Plutocracy is a dominant twist within our society which has a largely capitalist fabric but does not (as you go on to say) reflect a true capitalism. Just as no truly communist society has emerged. Western society is as capitalist (with it's social welfare and bailouts, etc.) as Soviet Russia was communist.
"Nor is capitalism about those who are the most productive. It is about those with the most capital, or other source of power, increasing their capital. Sure a by-product can be increased financial efficiency in production within a given company but overall I think it's bad for society."
What? Capital is gained precisely by increasing production and decreasing cost. Your statement of how capitalism works is completely wrong on its face.
I was looking at an individual level. If you have a lot of money, you may have been pr
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That's rediculous.
The AP does ONE THING. It licenses news stories to other people to broadcast/print. The sole reason for its existence is to license out content.
That means... anyone who doesn't pay the licensing fees and uses the content is liable to get sued.
Now in this case it's stupid because the party getting the cease and desist was an AP subscriber and also within his legal rights to share an AP video. To me this sounds more like a left hand not knowing what the right is doing.
But if anything the
Nothing more exciting than Big Org gets confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who has worked in a medium to large organisation will know how hard it is to find out what someone in the same building is doing, let alone some affiliate.
Re:Nothing more exciting than Big Org gets confuse (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think that somewhere near the top of the list of "authorised users" would be "Our Own Goddamn YouTube channel". That part shouldn't have been difficult. That the group checking for infringement weren't aware of the legit YouTube channel, and didn't comprehend what embedding it meant, suggests that the group looking for infringements is on more of a "shoot first, don't ask questions" approach. We take it for granted that fair use is dead, but having a department seemingly set up to block all use is beyond a joke.
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Have we learned nothing!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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A C&D is the first step that is required for suing someone. It's a required first step. You don't send C&D's unless you intend on following it up with a lawsuit if they don't cease and desist.
But then, this is Slashdot. Where any and every Anonymous Coward has to chime in, whether or not they know anything about the subject matter...oh, wait...damn...
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Are you serious?
I've sent cease and desist letters with the only intention being to get them to stop.
Perhaps in your world thats the only reason to do it, fortunately not everyone lives in that world.
Besides, if they do stop, there is no next step so it doesn't matter what the next step may be, there is no law suit.
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Not to mention that actually doing enough research to nail a *gasp* guilty party would reap loads of benefits.
For one, your reputation would be safe because you'd have a rock solid case in court, and people will know that you don't just fuck around and try to bullshit/extort people.
Litigation itself isn't hurting the RIAA. It's the lame, dumb-ass collateral damage they cause that gets them in deep shit with the public. If they only went after guilty people, I'd have a lot more respect for them. I would c
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I think the issue is that these companies don't realize how they're endangering their own reputations with these kinds of mass-litigation campaigns.
In most companies ordinary company employees don't go sending out C&D letters - or filing lawsuits. If somebody notices something amiss it goes way up the chain of command. Most likely the CEO would personally approve an action like this with input from counsel before taking this kind of step.
The problem is that when a company decides to get agreesive with
This can only be a good thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Necessity may be the mother of invention but laziness is the father.
Nothing better will come along until they find a way that's easier "for them". Inevitably however that system will be hard "for us".
This is how we get crap like DRM and such.
AP calls for free money from Google (Score:5, Insightful)
The Associated Press has asked the government to examine Google News and other content aggregators [today.com], claiming they contribute insufficiently to their income.
"The newspapers put their content up on the web for free and then Google, the freeloading bastards, tell people where to find it. We told them to pay up or stop using our stuff, and they said OK, they'd stop using our stuff!
"We need federal regulation to bring back balance, 'balance' defined as being able to make them give us money because we want it. You'd think the Internet wasn't invented to give news agencies and record companies free money!"
The press group argues that traffic from search engines doesn't make up the cost of producing the content. "Ad revenue has collapsed, so search engine traffic doesn't bring in enough views to pay for itself. Our inability to sell ads is clearly Google's problem."
The AP suggests the exploration of new models that "require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site through advertising and 'at the edges' in the world of search and aggregation. Basically, they should just give us money because we want it. And the music industry too. How about a bailout? Go on, gi's it."
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That's just it. They get ad revenue when people visit their sites. Google news drives customers to their sites producing ad revenue. However since theAP likes to print the same article in every newspaper and only a handful benefit from google news the AP want google to make up the difference.
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The problem is that the AP produce newspapers
That's a bit of news I'd missed. Since when? Which newspapers do AP produce?
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In theory none of them.
In practice, just about all of them.
That's part of what's killing newspapers, they all carry the *exact* same articles, because they rely pretty much completely on the AP for their content.
ex - news sys admin (Score:2, Insightful)
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I wasn't even paying attention, but that's precisely what happened to them. They're still reporting my grandparents' news. And quite frankly, I don't care. They so rarely talk about anything I care about that I've basically never paid attention to them. When they attempt to talk about something I care about, they muck it up so badly that the result is useless or worse than useless by being outright misleading. If they can avoid that trap, by some miracle, they still screw it up by reporting just the fa
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Ominous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ominous (Score:5, Interesting)
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There's always been a free flow of information... (Score:2)
Even in colonial times.
One person bought a newspaper, and then proceeded to tell the story to all of his friends, associates, etc...
It wasn't until the small-town atmosphere went away that newspapers were able to become the big businesses they are (were?!) today. News readership requires a *certain level* of interaction - too much, and no one reads the stories; too little, and there's no point in reading the stories (with whom would you discuss the news?). The problem is that getting the mix right is
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I'm not disagreeing with you, and not trying to troll, but from the perspective of the people running news agencies or the AP, what is the new business model they should shift to?
Whether we like it or not, it takes money to cover the news and more money--though less and less lately--to deliver it. Turning it over to bloggers won't h
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The original poster cannot read. The Associated Press is not going after Google, which is one of their customers who PAYS them for content. However I guess it became a frequently asked question by Google News users [pcmag.com]. The person pointing the finger at Google for stealing content is Rupert Murdoch [pcmag.com]. Rupert Murdoch is the very old CEO and chairman o
Gordian Knot (Score:2)
You all know what the solution is.
Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Flash - a-ah - saviour of the universe
Flash - a-ah - he'll save everyone of us
*ducks*
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Maim kill burn, maim kill burn?
Charlie Rose (Score:1, Informative)
Anyone see the CEO on Charlie Rose last night?
Rose asked him for details on how he was planning on executing the control that he said they wanted.
His response was long, but the most important part was one word: Beacon
He wants to "embed a beacon" in the news to let them know where it is being used.
Um. Good luck with that...
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Clear solution (Score:2)
Clearly, any business that doesn't want to get sued needs to stay far away from AP. Clearly it's become dangerous to do business with them.
I guess if the AP wants to stay in the news business, they'd better start shopping for a printing press.
since this is new policy for the AP... (Score:2)
This is clearly some ladder-climbing scheme by some jr. executive.
When the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, it's time to cut them both off.
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Seems like each hand thinks it's the only one.
Breaking news, the orginization is too big... (Score:2)
Slavery, Plain and Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
When it became illegal to own people those that depend on slavery found new ways to own, not people, but everything about the person.
Own his land, you own him.
Bury him in debt and own his debt, you own him.
Throughout history people have alwasy sought ways to make slaves of their neighbors, now in the 21st century the method is:
Own his thoughts, you own him.
Thought crime is the new tool to make slaves of people; how dare the slaves think without permission. Think only what we tell you to think. We people exist for the benefit of the master, in this case businesses.
Goverment as king, business as the fiefs, the executives as the lords, and we the people have become intellectual share croppers; and have been returned to our proper place as slaves\pesants\serfs... Steal from the pesants and profit, steal from the master and suffer his wrath... The knights have been replaced with lawyers and history repeats itself...
Re:Yeah, well... (Score:4, Funny)