Comments on: AP sues news aggregator for linking, scraping

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:18:58 +0000

Perhaps book publishers should sue all these sites that list all their titles without licensing the books’ copyrights.

By: Gorman

Gorman — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:57:24 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:09:01 +0000

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?

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:08:53 +0000

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.

By: Harry

Harry — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:00:12 +0000

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.

By: tdc

tdc — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:21:05 +0000

there sure is technological solution… innovation.

on the local level one might start by acknowledging the competition.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:06:21 +0000

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.

By: Steve Safran

Steve Safran — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:01:52 +0000

The AP has to…. oh - Terry beat me to it.

By: Terry Heaton

Terry Heaton — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:08:54 +0000

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.

By: Brink

Brink — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:33:43 +0000

Finally. I can’t understand why it took this long.