Fergie's Tech Blog

AP to Use Copyright-Protection Service

An AP newswire article by Michael Leidke, via Yahoo! News, reports that:

The Associated Press will intensify its efforts to protect its copyrights on the Web and possibly uncover new sources of revenue by working with a Silicon Valley startup that's trying to help the media gain more control over digital content.

Under an agreement to be announced Thursday, the AP will subscribe to a service developed by Attributor Corp. to track how its stories are distributed across thousands of Web sites. The monitoring tools eventually will be expanded so the news cooperative will be able to keep tabs on the use of its photos and videos on the Internet, too.

Although precise terms aren't being disclosed, the AP's fees will depend largely on how heavily it relies on Attributor's service.

More here.

Note: Somehow, this sounds like trouble -- or at least an opportunity to be somewhat abusive in copyright protection.

The Associated Press should understand, as many other news outlets have come to understand, that blogs especially drive more traffic towards their outlets when an acceptable use allowance is granted to use a few leading paragraphs to capture the nature of the news, then drive it towards their news outlet.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

- ferg

posted by Fergie @ 5/30/2007 10:02:00 PM