Read almost any blog, and you’ll find an Associated Press article being quoted. Usually it’s just a paragraph or two, and most bloggers have assumed such quoting qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright laws.
The AP has a different opinion. Last week, it sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Drudge Retort blog — a left-wing response to the popular Drudge Report — demanding the site remove several items that included relatively brief excerpts of AP stories, from 39 to 79 words.
But faced with an onslaught of criticism from bloggers, the AP made a quick about-face. After issuing a determined statement on Friday that it would go after bloggers when it feels “the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s vice president and strategy director, told The New York Times that approach was “heavy-handed.”
Heavy-Handed Letter
“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Kennedy said.
The upshot is that the AP has promised to release a comprehensive set of guidelines on what it considers acceptable quoting in blogs. That’s something bloggers need now, said Rogers Cadenhead, owner of the Drudge Retort. “There are millions of people sharing links to news articles on blogs, message boards and sites like Digg. If the AP has concerns that go all the way down to one or two sentences of quoting, they need to tell people what they think is legal and where the boundaries are.”
But Michael Arrington at the influential TechCrunch blog believes such a policy is an illegal infringement on the fair-use doctrine, and has vowed not to link to or quote AP stories.
Fair Use?
“The AP doesn’t get to make it’s…