AP tries gutting fair use

Copyright law has a concept called fair use, which lets you quote small pieces of copyrighted works without gaining permission from the copyright holder.

But the Associated Press apparently doesn't believe in this concept. The AP is now trying to make blogs (such as this one) buy licenses just to quote AP articles in a manner that fair use protects. These licenses start at $12.50 costly dollars for quotes of only 5 to 25 words - which is far smaller than what fair use allows for free.

And if you buy this license to quote the AP, but offend the AP in quoting it, the AP gets to terminate your license.

The AP's new policy also offers hefty rewards for people to rat each other out for violations.

Sorry, APee, but you're not the one who gets to decide when fair use applies and when it doesn't. Fair use is the law. If bloggers excerpting 5-word quotes from AP pieces was illegal, the AP would have raised an outcry about it years ago. So I'm just gonna ignore the AP's stance.

The policy is especially ironic because ASSociated Press articles often feature quotes from people that are much longer than 5 words in length. Can the people quoted in its stories make the AP pay them a licensing fee?

I think this new development is another sign that the dinosaur media is on borrowed time. Otherwise they wouldn't be trying to drive innovative bloggers out of business.

(Source: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010341.html)