Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 15

“We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more,” Associated Press Chairman Dean Singleton said a week ago at the annual AP meeting.

What are “we” mad about?

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” Singleton explained, noting that the AP board has decided to take whatever legal and legislative steps necessary to protect from Internet thievery the content produced by AP and its members.

“We believe all of your newspapers will join our battle to protect our content and receive appropriate compensation for it,” Singleton told an applauding audience. “AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.”

Frankly, AP is an accessory before the fact in many cases. Facilitating the plagiarists by rewriting its members’ news content shortly after it hits the doorstep or a newspaper Web site.

Go to Google’s or Yahoo’s news sections and search for “vegas.” You’ll turn up dozens of recent stories attributed to AP and located on any number of Web sites — a high percentage of which originated with the Review-Journal and occasionally still carry the byline of a Review-Journal reporter.

Yes, something must be done. Something more than a senseless and futile gesture.

AP posted some answers to FAQs that address the problem, but don’t really offer solutions.

But No. 8 addresses some key elements: “Why not just harness the so-called ‘link economy’ to attract the audience?

“The world has benefited from the link construct of the Web. The AP initiative is not about prohibiting this. Instead, it is about making sure that consumers have access to authoritative news sources and that they can engage with news content in a more robust and timely way at the same time publishers and content owners receive a fair return on their investments in newsgathering and distribution.”

Admittedly, AP has taken some action to counter the news theft.

A year ago AP sued a Florida-based company called All Headline News, claiming the company was stealing AP copy, rewriting it and selling it to its clients.

It’s not like there is anything new under the sun, a hundred years ago the AP sued an outfit calling itself the International News Service, making similar claims.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling then could as easily apply to today’s intellectual property pirates: “Stripped of all disguises, the process amounts to an unauthorized interference with the normal operation of complainant's legitimate business precisely at the point where the profit is to be reaped, in order to divert a material portion of the profit from those who have earned it to those who have not, with special advantage to defendant in the competition because of the fact that it is not burdened with any part of the expense of gathering the news. The transaction speaks for itself, and a court of equity ought not to hesitate long in characterizing it as unfair competition in business.”