The Associated Press, a not-for-profit coop owned by its 1,500 member newspapers, is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, boasting 243 bureaus in 97 countries and employing some 4,100 people. It serves about 5,000 radio and television outlets and 850 radio news affiliates. It has won 49 Pulitzer Prizes including 30 for photography. It describes itself as “the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees news from AP.”

Why am I telling you this? Because I can’t think of a better way to tell you it’s probably not a good idea to mess with them.

They recently issued a stern warning to webmasters, aggregators, bloggers, scrapers, googlers, binggers, pirates and freemongers that it is determined to limit unauthorized use of A.P.-generated content. To reinforce its edict, the company is embedding software in its articles specifying just how much you are entitled to use. And, according to Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times, you’re entitled to use damn little.

Writes Perez-Pena: “Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs… If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

In other words, pay the price or pay the price.

If the phrase “Fair Use” just popped into your mind, we’re way ahead of you. News aggregators such as yours truly justify their quotations from newspapers and magazines on the grounds that United States copyright law recognizes it as a right – within limits.

And just what are the limits? One hundred words? Okay, but what if the article is 105 words long? Surely eight words constitutes fair use, yes? Yes, unless those words happen to be Robert Frost’s unique and immortal, “Whose woods these are I think I know?” A. P.’s Curley ducked the question of what’s fair, nor would he say just what the organization would do to perpetrators who step over the line – once he has drawn it, that is. “We’re not picking the legal remedy today,” Perez-Pena reports him saying.

Where I come from, you don’t make threats unless you’re prepared to back them up, and threats by the media against end users seldom engender good will. We recently wrote about a recording industry lawsuit brought against a lady who had the misfortune to upload some music into her iPod.

Another NY Times article, this one by Saul Hansell, reports on a California startup called Attributor that claims to have “developed an automated way for newspapers to share in the advertising revenue from even the tiniest sites that copy their articles.” So far, Attributor’s role has been to report to interested media outfits like the Times Company, Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast how extensively their content is being copped by bloggers and others. By showing its clients how leaky their ships are, Attributor hopes the next step will be to bludgeon freeloaders into paying up. How will they do this? One solution is for publishers to bombard websites with demands to remove “pirated” pages, forcing webmasters to spend their valuable time complying with take-down notices.

Before you click away, and especially before you dismiss A. P.’s initiative as another attempt to thwart your sense of entitlement, spend some time reading about Associated Press. It is a very formidable organization and not one at which you want to wave a red flag.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times – and, of course the Associated Press.