More details about Asso­ci­ated Press’s move to pro­tect its con­tent unveiled at Seat­tle summit

I left the Pacific North­west News­pa­per Asso­ci­a­tion Sum­mit of news­pa­per pub­lish­ers and ad man­agers yes­ter­day just as two exec­u­tives from the Asso­ci­ated Press were wind­ing up their pre­sen­ta­tion on the new AP News Registry.

The new ini­tia­tive, announced in July, con­tains two key components:

• All AP sto­ries will be released online wrapped in a new microso­for­mat that includes rights info, who cre­ated it, etc.

• The wrap­per also will carry a built-in “dig­i­tal bea­con,” or tracker, to mon­i­tor use of the con­tent by oth­ers to track usage and com­pli­ance. (As I under­stand this, the con­tent is not encrypted but car­ries a light­weight bug technology.)

As a social media con­sul­tant and jour­nal­ist who spoke at the sum­mit just an hour ear­lier, I asked whether the dia­logue and AP’s plans were pub­lic infor­ma­tion, and Kevin Walsh, AP’s Kevin Walsh, Vice Pres­i­dent of Mar­ket­ing, responded, “It is now.”

AP’s plans were met with the pred­i­ca­ble neg­a­tive reac­tion in the blo­gos­phere (see, for exam­ple, the com­ments at bot­tom of this arti­cle). But AP should be cred­ited with its trans­parency dur­ing this process, and from what I heard at the sum­mit, its plans make a lot of sense. Thou­sands of sites are unfairly pig­gy­back­ing off the work of jour­nal­ists, and if news­pa­pers and news orga­ni­za­tions like the AP are to sur­vive, there has to be a mech­a­nism for compensation.

As an inter­nal AP doc­u­ment titled Pro­tect, Point, Pay – An Asso­ci­ated Press Plan for Reclaim­ing News put it: “The evi­dence is every­where: orig­i­nal news con­tent is being scraped, syn­di­cated and mon­e­tized with­out fair com­pen­sa­tion to those who pro­duce report and ver­ify it.”

Fair use won’t be easy to define

It’s a topic I have some famil­iar­ity with, hav­ing writ­ten Dark­net and reported on Hol­ly­wood stu­dios and media com­pa­nies’ reluc­tance to embrace their dig­i­tal future. At the time I wrote the book, there was wide­spread music file shar­ing (there still is) but also an increas­ing recog­ni­tion that the orig­i­nal Nap­ster was mis­guided and the music indus­try needed to devise legit­i­mate forms of com­pen­sa­tion for the artists. (Apple’s iTunes and Rhap­sody are among the com­pa­nies still try­ing to cre­ate a fric­tion­less busi­ness model.)

My view on the new AP ini­tia­tive is sim­i­lar: Some reuse of AP’s con­tent is socially and legally accept­able, but there needs to be lim­its. What will mat­ter, in the end, is how this plan will be car­ried out by AP and the cooperative’s mem­bers. If they go too far and claim “all rights reserved” around the first two sen­tences of every AP arti­cle, the blow­back will be enor­mous. Fair use exists, and in the past the AP has paid too lit­tle heed to those con­cerns — even though AP reporters rely on the same fair use doc­trine in their reports nearly every day. (For exam­ple, I didn’t get the AP’s per­mis­sion to use the graphic at the top of this post.)

Todd B. Mar­tin, AP’s Vice Pres­i­dent, Tech­nol­ogy Devel­op­ment, reas­sured the pub­lish­ers in the room that the intent of the news reg­istry isn’t to go after every blog­ger who bor­rows a snip­pet of an AP news story.

Instead, Mar­tin said, “We’re not going to stop a blog­ger from cut and past­ing an arti­cle. But we are giv­ing you vis­i­bil­ity into the 20,000 other domains where your con­tent appeared and the top users and where it was mon­e­tized. So you can get a list of the top 100 [infring­ing] sites with over 100,000 views, and then facil­i­tate busi­ness devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties” with the sites in ques­tion. The reg­istry, Mar­tin said, would help cre­ate new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties and prod­ucts and also but­tress more rig­or­ous legal enforce­ment of the AP’s intel­lec­tual property.

That busi­ness devel­op­ment, pre­sum­ably, would go some­thing like this: You’re tak­ing our con­tent with­out autho­riza­tion. Sign up for a sub­scrip­tion, remove it, or face the legal con­se­quences. It sounds as though AP will be cre­at­ing a new cat­e­gory of sub­scribers that falls short of a stan­dard mem­ber­ship subscription.

I asked the first ques­tion: When a blog­ger or third-party pub­lisher repro­duces part of an AP story on his own site or blog, how much bor­row­ing is per­mis­si­ble? What is the cut­off point between fair use and a trig­ger mech­a­nism that requires a sub­scrip­tion payment?

“We’re focused on remov­ing the ambi­gu­ity around the use of our con­tent,” Mar­tin responded. “The reg­istry will help you decide whether that use is per­mit­ted or whether it’s a busi­ness devel­op­ment oppor­tu­nity” requir­ing payment.

Which, of course, doesn’t answer the ques­tion at all. For a sim­ple rea­son: There is no bright line. But I do agree with AP on this: There is a line at some point. It comes down to con­text: rea­son­able light­weight bor­row­ing vs. pat­terns of appro­pri­at­ing reportage and pho­tographs for profit. It appears AP and its mem­bers will take things on a case-by-case basis until some con­ven­tions and rules of the road are established.

Recently in his Medi­aShift blog, Mark Glaser did a bril­liant job of expos­ing the unscrupu­lous prac­tice of sites like Gawker and site scrap­ers that reuse copy­righted mate­r­ial with­out autho­riza­tion, pay­ment or trans­form­ing it in a sig­nif­i­cant way: Using the ‘Steal-O-Meter’ to Gauge if Sto­ries Steal or Pro­mote.

It’s a con­ver­sa­tion we’ve avoided for a long, long time.

Time­line for implementation

The AP execs unveiled their time line for implementation:

• Novem­ber 2009: AP News Reg­istry in beta test for track­ing and report­ing of AP content

• Jan­u­ary 2010: Reg­istry to include con­tent from mem­bers of the cooperative

• Jan­u­ary 2010: AP mem­bers will be asked to approve and post new AP terms and con­di­tions of use

• Q3 2010: AP News Reg­istry will launch with production-quality release for AP and mem­ber content

I hope AP con­sults with groups of blog­gers and inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists before assert­ing its intel­lec­tual prop­erty claims online, lest it become the RIAA of the social media era.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.