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AP takedown fallout

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I’m happy to see the AP vs. Drudge Retort story picking up steam. It’s fun watching the way this issue cuts across so many divisions in the blogosphere. It’s a sort of reverse wedge!

We’ve got the paleolithic types at Little Green Footballs calling the AP on its “caveman approach” of intimidating the liberal-minded Drudge Retort site — and agreeing with lions of the Democratic ‘sphere! We’ve got the deans of the tech blogosphere joining media bloggers and political bloggers.

Meanwhile, Patrick Nielsen Hayden alerts us to the wacky form at the AP site that lets you pay AP $12.50 each time you want to quote 5 to 25 words from a story! Gee, thanks! As one commenter at Hayden’s site joked, “Do we get to choose which five words?”

Mark Glaser is good on this controversy, and I agree with him that the boycott calls are over the top. (He’s also got a link to a great discussion of the legal issues from David Ardia.) I can’t see a boycott making a huge difference. But I can see a lot of bloggers just avoiding the hassle of worrying about the AP’s lawyers and finding some other non-AP accounts to link to. AP will ultimately be the loser, as web writers and readers fill in the space AP leaves from other sources. There might be some gaps at first, but they’d get filled in the long run.

That sound in the distance is timbers cracking in the old business-model structure. The AP is a strange beast, dependent on its members, and its members are hurting, too. I’m not surprised that it’s lashing out. But I don’t think it’s helping its own future by insisting that people pay to quote headlines and short excerpts.

In the meantime, the biggest priority here for those of us who care about the long-term health of the web is that we don’t wind up with a terrible legal precedent that defines fair use in some newly constricted way. The people who are calling the AP out on this aren’t crazed piratical scofflaws; they’re journalists and authors, just as I am, people who pay the rent based on the value of the content they produce. But you need some assurance that you can quote brief excerpts or you can’t write non-fiction at all.

(I mean, if I had to pay for every 25-word excerpt of a blog that I’ll be quoting in my next book, I wouldn’t even bother trying to write it…)

UPDATE: On the Times “Bits” blog, Saul Hansell complains that hotheaded bloggers calling for a boycott aren’t helping things; he’d rather see a dialogue in which bloggers might get guidance from the AP about what’s acceptable. Matthew Ingram responds that such a dialogue is unlikely to be fruitful and that bloggers have the law on their side here. This is getting interesting…

AP backs off — or does it?

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Confusing NY Times piece up tonight first suggests that the AP has “retreated” in an “about face” after its hamhanded takedown notices sent to Rogers Cadenhead and his Drudge Retort.

But then near the bottom of the piece we learn that the organization is still demanding that Cadenhead delete the posts. On the one hand, AP execs are saying that they’ve decided to “suspend their efforts” to intimidate bloggers, yet on the other hand they are saying that “the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items.”

Maybe this is a face-saving walk-back. But as long as the demand is still being made, the possibility of a really destructive precedent getting set also remains.

The really puzzling thing here is this:

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

What a bizarre notion! We are apparently going to serve our readers better by paraphrasing and linking than by quoting and linking (as I just did). This strains credulity. The “spirit of the Internet” has always been about linking and excerpting. Actually, the “spirit of the Internet” is probably even more about wholesale copying. But that spirit has always had to make tradeoffs with businesses like the AP. I hope the company’s leaders continue to step back from the absurd brink they’ve conjured for themselves.

(Simon Owens posted a brief interview with Cadenhead on this controversy but it doesn’t shed further light on that question.)

AP responds on blog excerpting

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I just received email that I assume is genuine with this statement from the AP:

AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent actions with the Drudge Retort, and also reassure those in the blogosphere about AP’s view of these situations. Yes, indeed, we are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond brief references and direct links to our coverage.

The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers — large and small — in the news conversation of the day. Some of the largest blogs are licensed to display AP stories in full on a regular basis. We genuinely value and encourage referring links to our coverage, and even offer RSS feeds from www.ap.org, as do many of our licensed customers.

We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That’s not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the Internet that bloggers have cultivated so well.

In this particular case, we have had direct and helpful communication with the site in question, focusing only on these issues.

So, let’s be clear: Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but Jeff Jarvis’ call for widespread reproduction of wholesale stories is out of synch with the environment he himself helped develop. There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers.

Jim Kennedy
VP and Director of Strategy for AP

Let’s unpack this just a bit: AP is saying it’s OK to link, but that they “get concerned” over use that is “more reproduction than reference or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.”

But what I saw on Drudge Retort was brief excerpts of much longer stories. That’s the issue here. (Jeff Jarvis’s call for protest reposts is really a side issue — it gives AP a cleaner-cut case to object to than the main dispute.)

Brief excerpts should be considered fair use. I imagine AP wants to draw a line in the sand and discourage excerpting so that it doesn’t have to confront the tough problem of a “slippery slope” of ever-lengthening excerpts that become, de facto, full-text republication.

But unfortunately fair use law doesn’t draw such a line. It doesn’t say, “75 words is OK, 100 words isn’t.” And the AP will set a terrible precedent for the Web if it manages to intimidate people from doing anything but linking, and effectively outlaws the reasonable use of brief excerpts.

AP sends takedown letters to Drudge Retort: Do excerpts and links infringe?

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Rogers Cadenhead has long run a site called the Drudge Retort at www.drudge.com. Today he posted the news that the site has been targeted by the Associated Press with DMCA takedown orders. AP is complaining about a bunch of posts on Drudge Retort that contain brief excerpts of longer AP stories and links to those stories on other sites.

According to the AP, this is copyright infringement. (Here’s the text of the complaint.)

If the AP is right, then something like 99.9% of the world’s millions of bloggers are engaged in copyright infringement, simply by excerpting the articles bloggers link to.

Something’s wrong with this picture!

Fair use has always been a sticky area of the law because there are no clear boundaries to what’s acceptable; instead there is a set of principles that get weighed to determine whether the reuse of copyrighted material is considered to fall under fair use.

One thing that I always assumed was clear fair use, though, was short excerpts of longer articles, properly credited and linked to, for the purpose of commentary. This meets several of the fair use criteria (amount used, transformation of the work, effect of use on work’s market value) head on.

Of course I Am Not a Lawyer, but I dealt with this sort of thing for years at Salon. (We took considerable umbrage at the way users at certain sites reposted entire Salon articles which they wanted to read and critique. Because they disagreed with us politically, they wanted to deny us the ad revenue we’d get if they read the articles on our site. This was not fair use. But they could have excerpted and linked easily enough!)

It looks to me like Cadenhead is being targeted for some other reason, with the infringement complaint as some sort of smokescreen. Either that, or the AP has decided it wants to blow up the blogosphere. Since bloggers are some of the most avid consumers of news, this sue-your-customers strategy is likely to be about as effective as the RIAA’s was.

Please pay attention, please?

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Here’s a few other links carrying on from yesterday’s post about Nick Carr’s lament that Google and the web in general have made it harder for us to pay attention to books.

Howard Rheingold links to a post on Timothy Ferriss’s blog, by Josh Waitzkin, titled “the multitasking virus.” Waitzkin paints a scene in which listless college students shop on their laptops while their professor’s giving an inspired lecture on Gandhi and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Howard, ever the intelligent pragmatist, says he’s most interested in “engaging students in learning how to train their attention.” He’s right. Most of us, today, could use some serious and rigorous training in attention-focusing skills. Meditation is probably the best. Organizational tools can help, too. Whatever works for you. Howard used to urge people to “pay attention to what you’re paying attention to,” and that was good advice; today we also need to pay attention to how we’re paying attention.

It’s undeniable that the web and all its tools add to the volume of potential interruptions in the workday. There’s nothing new about the interruptions themselves, and we faced them long before we had computers on our desks. (My reading of the Waitzkin post, for instance, was interrupted by an unsolicited telemarketing phone call which, however noble the cause — the American Cancer Society — constituted a far more severe violation of my focus than anything my computer screen can throw at me.) But the Net gives anyone with a proclivity for procrastination a nearly infinite number of options to avoid doing whatever one Must Get Done.

This topic is only going to become more urgent. Today’s Wall Street Journal included a review of a new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, which I just ordered (it’s by a writer named Maggie Jackson, and has a foreword by my friend Bill McKibben). I’ll look forward to reading the book when I get it. (I hope it’s better than the hilariously overwrought subtitle.)

In the meantime, I should say that the Journal reviewer, David Robinson, lost me when he declared that Twitter is “an update service devoted to what-are-you-doing-at-this-moment inanity.” Sure, there are plenty of Twitter users who are inane, but — after a period in which I couldn’t quite get what all the fuss was about — I’m finding my small-but-growing group of people-who-I-follow to be a valuable source of real-time Web pointers. Like any popular Web platform, Twitter is as bad or as good as whatever sliver of it you choose to pay attention to.

Right about now is where I should say that I heard about Howard’s post itself because he posted about it on Twitter.

Links for June 12th: Vanity Fair nonsense, Mayhill Fowler vs. Politico, new Opera, Wikipedia style

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  • Blogopticon | vanityfair.com: Chart professes to track popular blogs along two axes, news/opinion and scurrilous/earnest, but it is ridiculous and riddled with errors (BoingBoing started as a webzine? who knew!) I mean, Valleywag is more earnest than scurrilous? Huh?
  • Jane Hamsher: Mayhill Fowler and the Sock Puppetry of Politico: While everyone is complaining that Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter to Clinton (and yeah, she should have, but he should have known he was on the record, too, right? He’s the pro?), the Politico editor argues that sockpuppetry (disguising yourself in blog comments) is no big deal. How frequently can the pros shoot themselves in the feet before there’s no foot left to shoot?
  • Opera releases 9.5 edition of browser: been using Opera as my primary browser since 2000 or so. Firefox is great too — 3.0 due out soon! — but Opera does some remarkable things, and I still find it more responsive to the way I work (millions of open tabs, nearly all the time). Though with Firefox 3.0 I’ll have to consider, once more, whether to switch.

Nick Carr’s new knock on the Web: does it change how we read?

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The funny thing about Nick Carr’s Atlantic cover piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” is that the piece itself has the truncated quality that it blames the Internet for imposing on our culture. When my copy of the magazine (yes, I actually subscribe on paper) arrived I saw the headline and looked forward to a really thorough, in-depth look at this question. Carr’s entirely capable of that; I disagree with much of his perspective in “The Big Switch,” but it’s one of the more cogent and sustained critiques of the Web 2.0 future, and anything but lightweight. So I figured the Atlantic had paid Carr to do what the Atlantic, and only a tiny handful of outlets, can still do: spend many thousands of words digging into the heart of an important issue.

Ah, well. You can still find such pieces in the Atlantic (like this one about rising crime rates in mid-sized American cities), but Carr’s isn’t one of them. At 4000 words, it’s barely longer than the kind of thing Salon does every day. It’s a provocative read scattered with tasty quotes and anecdotes; it asks a useful question but does little to answer it. Carr starts off describing a sense of alienation from old-fashioned reading that he shares with several other people he quotes:

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Like Carr, I’ve found myself reading fewer books over the past decade. I can’t tell whether it’s because I’m spending more time on the Web (certainly possible). In my case, if my attention span has shortened at all, I think it’s far more likely that, for instance, raising children has cut into both my available time and my reserve of repose (both actual physical sleep time and emotional reserve of patience). But when I do get the chance to sit back with a good book — like two I’ve recently finished, Faking It (with related blog by authors Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker) and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (also with author blog) — I don’t feel any less absorbed than when I was a teenager plowing my way through a shelf of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

I don’t want to discourage you from reading Carr’s article and pondering the issues it raises. Does Google represent the digital apotheosis of Taylorism (the industrial-age science of labor measurement)? Does the Web crowd out the opportunity for leisurely contemplation or “slow, concentrated thought”? Those of us who use the Web constantly are probably experiencing changes in how we read and think; what are those changes?

These aren’t stupid questions. But they deserve deeper contemplation than Carr has provided. His piece is less like a thoroughly researched magazine piece than, say, the prospectus for a writing project. Perhaps the Atlantic has simply published Carr’s next book proposal. If so, I’d look forward to reading the resulting book — in a relaxed, contemplative way, of course.

Further discussion from Matthew Ingram, Matt Asay and Blaise Alleyne.

UPDATE: Jon Udell finds Carr’s critique “spot on.”

Page-views — in 2008?

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Apologies for the light posting, which will continue for a bit. Combination of head-down-in-book-work and family commitments. Got a long post from the D conference brewing, but haven’t been able to pull it together yet.

In the meantime, interesting piece in today’s Journal about the failure (so far) of much-touted Washington Post “hyperlocal” experiment, LoudounExtra.com. The guy in charge, Rob Curley, admits he spent too much time talking up the project with news executives and not enough actually getting to know the people the site was supposed to be serving. (Points, at least, for honesty.) A classic community-building mistake that I’m sure he won’t make again.

But what caught my eye was this bit tucked in a background graph about Curley:

Perhaps his biggest success was the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World’s KUSports.com, a site dedicated to University of Kansas sports that grew during Mr. Curley’s three-year reign from 500,000 monthly page views to a one-time peak of about 13 million monthly page views.

Page views, though superior to the old “hit” metric, were never an ideal measure of real value in online publishing (I wrote about this in Salon in 1999). In the era of Ajax-style web applications, where the browser might stay on one page while you work on email or something else for a half hour, page-views are meaningless. Once upon a time, sites broke up long articles into pages to squeeze out a few more ad impressions; today, pages are less and less the unit of web content, which now comes at us in widgets and RSS and a hundred other generated-and-remixed formats.

It was so quaint to see a big page-view number touted as the sign of a site’s success in 2008 — like a dotcom bubble flashback…

Gates and Ballmer at D: Lament for lost youth

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I’m keeping my head down in my book writing, mostly, this year, but I allowed myself one trip to one industry event, so here I am at Walt Mossberg’s and Kara Swisher’s D conference again. New owner (who’ll be here tomorrow); same friendly proprietors.

Things kicked off tonight with a double interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. After last year’s psychodramatically rich confrontation between Gates and the other Steve in his life, this event was decidedly more tepid. Gates has had one foot out the door of his company for a long time, of course, but as he prepares to depart fully from active duty next month, he might have figured on taking something of a victory lap here.

No such luck. Mossberg, inconveniently, kept bringing up the Vista fiasco. Gates wryly commented, “We have a culture that’s very much about, ‘We need to do it better,’ and Vista’s given us a lot of opportunity for that.”

Ballmer predicted a release of “Windows 7” — the successor to Vista — by late 2009. (Danger, Will Robinson! Remember the Longhorn slippages! Haven’t they learned?) There was a suggestion that we might get a look at the new Windows 7 interface here; but what was actually on display was some neat tricks involving multitouch interfaces for applications –a la the iPhone’s pinch-and-tap approach to using more than one point of contact on a touch screen to manipulate stuff. (The demo included an onscreen piano keyboard, but nobody actually tried to play a chord, which I’d have thought would be the obvious way to show off multitouch.) All this was neat enough, but not much to go on — and unless Windows 7 fixes a lot of Vista’s problems there will be a dwindling base of users to experience its neat touches.

Ballmer declared, unconvincingly, that he’s not stewing over the collapse of his attempt to acquire Yahoo: “I’m not frustrated at all. They’re great guys, they built a great company. We couldn’t agree on a price.” As he spoke, a blown-up Wall-Street-Journal woodcut portrait of Jerry Yang stared down at him from the wall. (Yang will be here tomorrow.)

Both Gates and Ballmer remained almost pathologically unable to utter the syllables “Google.” Ballmer attempted to explain how he sees Microsoft responding to the Google challenge: “You need scale, and business innovation, and technological innovation. You need breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation. You need it in search and in advertising. You need to bring it all together. And you need it at all levels of the stack.”

Whenever I hear a CEO say, “We need to do it all!” I translate: “We really don’t know what the hell to do here.”

Gates and Ballmer seemed most comfortable, and genuine, in reminiscing about their youth, as Harvard friends and then as partners in building Microsoft from the ground up. Are their best days behind them? They would never admit it, but no matter how brave a face they put on, or how rosily they paint Microsoft’s prospects, I think that on some level even they sense it.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski did the live-blogging thing here. No doubt there will be video up soon too.

Amanda Congdon’s back — but, er, not first

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I have a special place in my heart for video-blogging star Amanda Congdon, since through some total coincidence she ended up briefly plugging my book before it even came out. Thanks, Amanda! So I read with interest in today’s Times about her return to the web after apparently unsuccessful attempts to transition into more traditional broadcast gigs.

Then I read this:

“She was really one of the first, if not the very first, Internet blog stars,” said Dan Goodman, the president of digital media for Media Rights Capital. “She has been entertaining people in the digital space since there were people to entertain there.”

Where to begin? Congdon’s Rocketboom began, I’m pretty sure, around 2004. I do believe there were a few “Internet blog stars” already at that time.

As for the second claim: I think that “digital space” had its share of entertainment even back in the Usenet days. And certainly, even if your definition of “digital space” begins with HTTP, the first ten years of the Web pre-Rocketboom had its share of laffs, too.

I can’t say I’m surprised that some digital entertainment lawyer might be ignorant of this stuff. But, you know, the Times really shouldn’t be printing such silliness.