The Associated Press declares war on copyright infringement

The Associated Press will use a stronger arm in defending the circulation of its content. This recent article from the Huff Post talks about AP’s plans to track down every piece of its content online and sue the wrongful publishers.

Writer Art Brodsky calls AP Chairman Dean Singleton clueless for trying to do this. I can sympathize for people in the news biz wanting to salvage their product. The media don’t make money from the unauthorized publication of their content. This outburst is similar to other media owners’ outcry that Google and Yahoo should have to share ad revenue (they already pay a fee) with publishing company for the stories they aggregate.

Brodsky’s article criticizes these types of tactics from the industry. “If newspapers don’t want their material searched or indexed, they can simply not do deals with web sites or block search engines. Let’s see how well things work out.” Not only is this comment dripping in sarcasm, it’s completely backwards. Of course they want their material searched and indexed. That’s why they asked Google to tweak its algorithm to boost their listings in searches.

Newspapers aren’t seceding from the online market. To block search engines would be to sabotage their businesses. They’re simply trying to figure out how to swim as the huge swell of technology crashes agains them again and again!

Maybe newspapers are guilty of protectionism. But can we blame them, given the flogging the industry is getting right now?

But back to Singleton’s plan of attack. My main question is: How does he plan to track down every copyright infringement? He runs a worldwide news service with thousands of lawful subscribers. As Brodsky says, “there’s no way any software can tell what is fair use.”

So I’m not sure it’s constructive for AP to chase down its pirated stories on the Internet massif. Its time would be better spent trying to negotiate better deals with search engines and aggregaters. They could also try to grow their product in the expanding market for media. The better their delivery, the more readership they’ll get. And the less they’ll have to worry about users hacking their stories.