AP sues news aggregator for linking, scraping
Don Day October 10th, 2007
The Associated Press filed suit against VeriSign-owned news aggregator Moreover for “copyright infringement and trademark abuse.” Moreover is a service that scrapes news sources and provides links for a variety of clients. Moreover’s system provides a headline, link and short text snippet. (Sound familiar?)
The AP reports that the AP claims Moreover improperly displays the APs headlines and those text snippets (yes, I enjoyed that).
“The Associated Press spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and reporting the news, providing original coverage of vital breaking news that cannot be obtained anywhere else,” AP CEO Tom Curley said in a statement.
Ars Technica has an excellent analysis of the suit:
If they [wire services] don’t jealously guard their content, the organizations reason, many clients will simply acquire it secondhand from ultrafast aggregation services, instead of directly from the newswire. If that happens, the licensing revenue stream could dry up, taking AP with it.
The kicker: The AP discovered the alleged infringement while discussing a deal to provide content management to the wire’s members.
10 Comments Add your own
1. Brink | October 11th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Finally. I can’t understand why it took this long.
2. Terry Heaton | October 11th, 2007 at 7:08 am
The AP monopoly is interested only in the AP monopoly, and not its members. This is evidenced by the new relationship with Google, so this action strikes me as hypocritical, because they’re doing the same thing (profiting off of someone else’s content) as Moreover. At least Moreover provides a link to the source. AP doesn’t even do that.
The idea that you can create scarcity in a world of abundance is archaic, at best. Just ask the music industry.
Most observers view the tactic of circling the wagons as last-ditch attempts at survival, and that’s what’s taking place here. Protect your content by suing aggregators if you wish, but know that you’re risking irrelevance in the process.
3. Steve Safran | October 11th, 2007 at 8:01 am
The AP has to…. oh - Terry beat me to it.
4. Tim | October 11th, 2007 at 8:06 am
To paraphrase Shakespeare: “First, bring in the lawyers”
The problem with all online text content is that once it’s on a web page it’s trivial to retrieve it. Since most AP customers are going to put those stories on their web site, some aggregator will end up just scraping from multiple sources one or two layers removed from AP. Wherever the last legal source is, that’s where the news-harvesters will get it from.
I don’t think there’s a technological solution - therefore the lawyers are brought in.
5. tdc | October 11th, 2007 at 8:21 am
there sure is technological solution… innovation.
on the local level one might start by acknowledging the competition.
6. Harry | October 11th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Hmmmm, I see a reference to Google here…. interesting. Now go to Google News and see it there are any AP articles. I think I know where you can find them though : ). Follow the money.
7. Tim | October 11th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Innovation is great, and brings customers for a while.. but innovation never trumps free in today’s pay-attention-to-the-bottom-line-first journalism environment.
Note that I was not defending AP in my post, nor advocating lawyers being involved - I just don’t see that _anyone_ can avoid having their content taken - they can merely hope to receive compensation after the fact.
8. Anonymous | October 11th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
The AP’s content is its stories, not its headlines. Its headlines are just ads for its stories. Moreover is putting free AP ads all over the Internet, driving people to licensed AP stories. Why is the AP complaining about this?
9. Gorman | October 12th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Headlines aren’t necessarily ads. Most of the time it gives you the jist of a story, and if it’s a subject that doesn’t interest you, the basic jist is all you need, and you don’t have to click on it.
10. Anonymous | October 12th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Perhaps book publishers should sue all these sites that list all their titles without licensing the books’ copyrights.
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