Free Software Linux

Chances are if you didn't know anything about Web publishing a few months ago, you do now. News about the industry is hard to escape, and its growing popularity will continue as long as the economy spirals downward. The last few weeks have proved productive for those interested in expanding and promoting their presence on the Web.

This week in the Web publishing industry has been a little bit of everything: from blogs to online content, from social media to online visitors. We have also learned that 95 of the top 100 newspapers have blogs. As far as the numbers go, it was a great week to be an online publisher.

Can a newspaper exist without publishing syndicated news content? Early this month, The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, put this question to the test with a one-day boycott of The Associated Press news. The print issue relied primarily on stories by staff members, as well as Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, McClatchy-Tribune News Service and several smaller Advance Publication papers in New Jersey. After the one-day experiment, The Star-Ledger was back to publishing AP news.

It's over. The AP vs. Blogger debacle has been resolved. Sort of. After having engaged in a "constructive exchange of views this week with a number of interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers" the AP says "resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers.”

Mr TechCrunch can be slightly obnoxious at times, but on this one I can only applaud him: now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story). Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.

You know it was too good for us to just leave well enough alone. After all, who doesn't like a good fight? So that's why we're following the AP vs Bloggers story closely. Recent reports suggest that the Associated Press has scheduled a meeting for this morning with the Media Bloggers Association. In hopes of discussing appropriate guidelines for quoting AP stories, the phrase "fair use" is bound to make a few appearances, as well as lots of analytics, indicating, perhaps, the large amounts of traffic that the AP gets from humble little blogs.