Fair Use and AP

The Associated Press is attempting to enforce fair use tenets by tracking illegal use of its content and will "pursue legal and legislative actions" against its improper distribution.

Industry commentator Art Brodsky sees this as an ill-thought-out attempt to stop aggregators from using AP content without adequately reimbursing the content provider. He says the days of news organizations (i.e., newspapers) being the gatekeepers of information are over. The Internet has made that model obsolete.

Brodsky questions that fair use is even the issue here. Rather, he sees AP's announcement as yet another fight between the old, centrally controlled media model and the new, distributed network model. It's an economic fight, a fight for control, but it's not truly a legal battle, he contends.

This is highly reminiscent of the tussle between Gatehouse Media and the Boston Globe/New York Times over news aggregation and we know how that ended—with a whimper. (See my Jan. 30 post, "Fair Use vs. Coporate Greed," below.)

Rather than invent a new business model, the news industry seems to be fighting over the limited revenues available to Internet content providers, but no one seems to know how to address the central problem: if content is free, who can afford to provide it? The problem with establishing a legal precedent with regard to what's digital copyright infringement and what's not is this: users are impatient with anything that stands in the way of accessing information on the Internet quickly and for little—or no—cost. When providers make access costly, either in time or actual money, users will go elsewhere or do without.

Case in point: One of Brodsky's links took me to the Washington Post's site, which I could view only if I signed in. Since I didn't want to jump through their hoops (and it was FREE!), I never did look at that link.

Addendum: Read Maureen Dowd's take on it all.

4-21-09 Techdirt talks about Google and iParadigm's case.