why bloggers are boycotting AP

How convenient it is. Want to quote a news item in your blog? Just sign up here to pay per word.

I thought AP was a cooperative that encouraged the sharing of news among news organziations. Turns out its job is to rewrite copyright law. I thought this was benighted when I first heard about it. But it’s even sillier than I thought. Here’s a snip from their license agreement:

In consideration of the rights granted to You under this Agreement, You agree to pay the Licensing Fees specified in the order form. You hereby authorize Publisher and/or its authorized agent to collect the fees due from You under this Agreement by invoice or by debiting such fee to Your credit card entered on the Order Form. You warrant that You are the rightful owner of the credit card and are authorized to use such credit card. You further warrant that You are at least 18 years old.

My take: If You adhere to This Contract, You are a gullible Fool.

Parody is also no longer fair use. Nor can you offer any criticism.

You shall not use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to the author, the publication from which the Content came, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or depicted in the Content. You agree not to use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to or damaging to the reputation of Publisher, its licensors, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or referenced in the Content.

Apparently all uses of anything digital are licensed, not a matter of copyright. And I’ve probably violated a license by sharing this.

Hat tip to Ann Bartow at Sivacracy.

block (that) quote

It was bound to happen. The New York Times reports that AP is beginning to bristle at bloggers who quote from their news stories. They have asked the Drudge Retort (a left-leaning response to the Drudge Report) to remove some of its posts that quote from 39 – 79 words from news stories. They would prefer a paraphrase and a link. According to an AP spokesman, even their headlines are “creative content” that “has value.” Oops. I should have paraphrased that.

As a blog reader, I’m not taken with this idea. Yes to links, by all means – I want to see the original – but yes to direct quotes, too. The value of a news story isn’t diminished when it’s quoted (not paraphrased) and I don’t think it hurts a newspaper’s bottom line to have its content discovered through various channels. I know I read more newspapers now than in pre-Internet days, thanks to links encountered online. And if I’m interested, I do click through.

But for whatever reason, AP is concerned that their creative content is being stolen and says they will be developing fair use guidelines for bloggers. Good luck with that!

message force multipliers – worst Steven Siegal movie ever

FGI points out a wonderful take on the New York Times story that made my head explode, the one about defense contractors who also work as news analysts, generally not disclosing their conflict of interest – or that their talking points come from the Pentagon (where those defense contracts come from, so long as you deliver the right message – we’re winning.) I called them “shills.” The Pentagon calls them “message force multipliers.” Jon Stewart pictures them as machine guns spewing post-it notes.

The old-school in-depth investigative journalism in the Times gives us a lot to think about. Jon Stewart pulls out the good bits and makes them funny: for example, embedded journalism is actually an exchange program, with the military embedded in journalism.

Sadly, I can’t embed the piece here because WordPress doesn’t allow the kind of flash that Comedy Central uses, and the content from Comedy Central that used to be on the more user-friendly YouTube was removed so that we’d have to go to the Comedy Central site and watch their ads. So go to FGI to watch it while I mumble to myself about copyright law.

It’s beautiful to see how a little sarcasm can take ideas from a long and complex news story and distill it to . . . what do you call them? Laughing points? No wonder so many people get their news from Jon Stewart.

Time’s up

Glenn Greenwald of Salon says, “Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media.” Geez, thanks, but that’s a service I could do without.

Joe Klein, Time columnist (and writer of fiction) botched his analysis of the Restore Act, whipping up the kind of fear that works so much better than truth when it comes to getting your way. I’m not even going to link to his column; too many people who know nothing about it will read it and be misled. Even the correction is wrong. In fact, the Restore Act, if passed, will give the feds a lot of power that current law does not (unless you believe that presidents are exempt from the law, as our current decider consistently argues). Wired lays out the bad news:

[T]he Restore Act modifies FISA to let the NSA effortlessly get year-long warrants from the court to order AT&T to wiretap its internet backbone to capture all traffic going to Al Qaeda, Russia or even the World Trade Organization.

That’s also why the provision in question is known as the “basket order” provision, which the ACLU opposes and contends is unconstitutional, arguing it doesn’t fit with the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for warrants specifying the person and place to be searched.

That expansion is not even taking into account the court-free provision which would let the NSA order AOL, Yahoo and Google to give it a copy of all emails from their users when the IP addresses of the sender and receivers are believed to be in IP blocks outside the country.

The Restore Act is a clear and enormous expansion of the government’s traditional wiretapping powers under FISA.

But Klein’s column calls it giving terrorists civil liberties, and Time’s ‘correction’ fails to correct that.

Wired’s conclusion? “The whole magazine has proved itself too incompetent to write about anything more complicated than John Edwards’ haircut.” Of course, that’s the trivia upon which the current election hangs.

Klein has acknowledged he’s out of his depth – “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right” – adding, after comments suggested that’s an outrageous stance for a national columnist read by millions of people – “about this minor detail of a bill that will never find its way out of the Congress.”

Especially if widely-read columnists mislead the public and stir up unwarranted fear.

Wasserman on reviewing

CJR has a substantial piece on the decline of book reviewing by Steve Wasserman, former book review editor at the LA Times. He quotes the equally-former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of American newspapers in the 1990s is their hostility to reading in all forms.” Huh. Maybe that’s why print journalism is in trouble.

The article addresses the nonsensical but persistent idea that book coverage should be subsidized by book advertising. The former executive editor of the New York Times reportedly said: ““You can’t expect a payoff on reviewing books anymore than you can expect a payoff for covering foreign news.” (“Former” seems to be the proper form of address for newspaper editors.)

The peculiar thing is that though review space was shrinking, his newspaper was receiving around a thousand new books to review each week. Wasserman is puzzled that books are being shunted aside by newspapers now – just as they are reaching a new and huge audience.

Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

He cites an intriguing Gallup poll figure. “In 1937, Gallup found that only 29 percent of all adults read books; in 1955, the percentage had sunk to 17 percent. Fifteen years later, in 1970, the club evidently no longer could bear to know, and Gallup stopped asking.” A recent Ipsos poll found three out of four Americans had read a book in the previous year. Naturally the scare headline was My God, a quarter of Americans don’t read books! but three out of four is higher than many previous surveys.

I’ll have to dig up that Gallup poll and see what they actually asked, since there seems to be a disconnect here. Meanwhile, if you run out of reviews to read, you can always resort to books. There seem to be plenty of those to go around.