Attention bloggers – AP says stop copying so much

The Associated Press is working to develop its first-ever fair use guidelines for how much of online versions of newspaper stories bloggers can copy and paste in blog posts.

As an “old media” newspaper editor in my day job, albeit one who has rarely been copied by any blogger other than myself, I say, about time.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.

The Drudge Retort was initially started as a left-leaning parody of the much larger Drudge Report, run by the conservative muckraker Matt Drudge. In recent years, the Drudge Retort has become more of a social news site.

(Is that too much to quote from the story? Picture me with a half-ironic, half-sardonic look).

The AP says it still wants Drudge Retort to remove the verbiage, but it’s backed off on its immediate demand while it works on fair use guidelines.

AP vice president Jim Kennedy said his staff was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. Kennedy still says he wants to see more summaries and less direct copying by bloggers.

But, as the NYT story notes, the flip side of fair use is whether the creator has lost money due to the infringement.

“The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” said Timothy Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu said that the case is not clear-cut, but he believes that The A.P. is likely to lose a court case to assert a claim on that issue.

Plus, it would take a lot of discovery work to prove out any financial loss, even if it does exist.

First, that means small bloggers will be pretty much off the hook, unless the AP wants to get as ham-handed as the recording industry did with Napster. But Kennedy has already sworn that off:

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

Overall, by meeting with the bloggers’ group, Kennedy sounds like he’s being reasonable about this.

But, it also sounds like he’s what, about 8-10 years behind the curve? At least 5 or 6.

The ultimate answer? American newspapers becoming like the Guardian, perhaps, and incorporating as nonprofit organizations.