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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to “suspend their efforts” to intimidate bloggers, yet on the other hand they are saying that “the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items.”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.

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.

Clay Shirky and the cognitive surplus

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“You know, much of England was drunk on gin for 20 or 30 years during the 18th century.”

I studied English history, but my brother studied it more deeply than I did. So when he told me that, a long time ago, I filed it away in the back of my brain as an odd fact worth exploring at some point in the future. The file has been undisturbed ever since, until I watched Clay Shirky’s talk at the Web2.0 Expo.

Shirky tugs on that bit of information as part of a much larger argument that’s well worth a view (it’s about a 15-minute video — he’s also posted a transcript). In brief, he suggests that the English were so stunned and disoriented by the displacement of their lives from the country to the city that they anesthetized themselves with alcohol until enough time had passed for society to begin to figure out what to do with these new vast human agglomerations — how to organize cities and industrial life such that they were not only more tolerable but actually employed the surpluses they created in socially valuable ways.

This is almost certainly an oversimplification, but a provocative and fun one. It sets up a latter-day parallel in the postwar U.S., where a new level of affluence created a society in which people actually had free time. What could one possibly do with that? Enter television — the gin of the 20th century! We let it sop up all our free time for several decades until new opportunities arose to make better use of our spare brain-cycles — Shirky calls this “the cognitive surplus.” And what we’re finally doing with it, or at least a little bit of it, is making new stuff on the Web.

This argument is in some ways just an extension of Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (I’m in the middle of it, so, you know, maybe it’s all in there, though he says it’s not). But it also frames the larger sense I’ve had, from the moment I first saw the Web in 1994, that its importance lies in its potential for displacing TV.

It was the first medium I’d encountered in my life that looked like it had a chance of somehow challenging or eroding TV’s primacy in our world, and eliminating some of the distortions TV has rendered in our culture and politics. I’d spent the first part of my career chronicling a venerable medium — live theater — that has never properly recovered from the ascent of TV, so you know who I was rooting for.

Recalling a conversation with a TV producer skeptical that the participatory Web was anything more significant than LOLcats and World of Warcraft addicts, Shirky argues, “However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Marianne is cuter….It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

And so, because somebody chose to write a Web page rather than watch another sitcom, today you can read all you want about Britain’s Gin Craze on Wikipedia.

Flashback 9/11

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I’ve been spending a lot of time digging through the blogospheric record of 9/11. And it’s brought back some of my memories of those tense days and weeks — less tense in San Francisco, certainly, than in New York, but jittery nonetheless.

And I can’t help thinking, again, as I have before — on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, and again at the five-year milestone — how miserably the U.S. has fared in pursuing its interests since the towers fell. President Bush had a good first couple weeks (after a bad first couple of days), followed by an awful rest of the decade.

In the days after 9/11, we didn’t know whether there were more attacks in line. There was anthrax in the mail and fear in the air.

But we also had a measure of political unity, unthinkable now; an outpouring of good will from around the world; and a national resolve to bring the 9/11 perpetrators to justice.

If you could somehow send a messenger from today back to that packed joint session of Congress that Bush addressed on Sept. 20, 2001, Joe Future would have to say something like this:

“I’m sorry to tell you that, nearly seven years later, you won’t have captured Osama bin Laden. You’re going to have a big scare about anthrax-tainted letters, but you’ll never find out who sent them. You’re going to depose the Taliban only to let them survive and prosper. You’re going to invade Iraq, commit America to a disastrous open-ended occupation, and give the Islamists a whole new banner to recruit under. You’re going to bankrupt the Treasury, trample the Constitution, and drag the name of the U.S. through the mud.”

Such a prospect would, of course, have been unfathomable.

UPDATE: I didn’t even realize when I posted this last night that today is the fifth anniversary of Bush’s hubris-laden “Mission Accomplished” stage show. Thanks to Amos in the comments for pointing out.

Obama’s fundraiser, Mayhill Fowler, and the “supporter/reporter” question

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Here’s a fascinating story from Jay Rosen about the Off the Bus blogger who first reported on Obama’s “bitter in Pennsylvania” comments.

It turns out, as so many important stories do, to be far more complex and nuanced than anything you’re likely to have heard on TV or in the papers, which mostly preferred not to name the story’s source: Mayhill Fowler, an Obama supporter who has been blogging for Off the Bus (a collaboration between Huffington Post and Rosen’s NewAssignment, for which I have served as an adviser in the past).

Fowler attended Obama’s San Francisco fundraiser. Traditionally, the press has not reported on what candidates say at private fundraisers. Fowler seemed blur the roles of “supporter” and “reporter” well enough that she got access to the event without ever being asked not to cover it.

Rosen talks about how “uncharted” the campaign terrain is today, with no clear boundaries separating those participating in the campaign from those covering the campaign. In the New York Times, Katherine Seelye asks, “Is it possible to straddle the line between reporter and supporter?”

Fowler’s story answers that question pretty definitively. Of course it’s possible. The fixed roles of the old campaign drama are dissolving. Everyone’s improvising. The bad news is that a lot of people are confused. The good news is that a lot more people can participate — and hear what’s said behind previously closed doors.

If you are a politician speaking to a crowd — any crowd — you should pretty much assume that everything you say can and will be broadcast to the world. That’s the lesson that George Allen learned, and it’s one Obama should know, too.

Apparently some Obama supporters feel that bloggers should be understood to be “activists” not “journalists,” and that Fowler betrayed their cause:

Bloggers are viewed as activists, not journalists. It’ s why some campaigns have blogger conference calls and press conference calls. The blogger calls are to pump up the base. The press calls are to do spin and answer arguably tough questions. She was admitted to the private San Francisco fund-raiser as an activist blogger and then functioned as a journalist.

This strikes me as one of those distinctions that is untenable. Some bloggers are activists, some are journalists; some are diarists, some are businesspeople. Saying you’re “a blogger” doesn’t make you an activist or a journalist or anything else; all it means is that you’re someone who posts stuff on the Web. Since the Web is public, this practice has a natural slope, a gravitational pull; things roll naturally from the private to the public.

So, yes, on the Web the “line between supporter and reporter” has been smudged out. One result, this week, is that Obama’s campaign has suffered a setback — and as an Obama supporter, I might be mildly disappointed. But, far more importantly, as a journalist I’m happy to see more and more of the previously curtained elements of our election process brought forth into view. Ultimately, it’s better for everyone to know what Obama said at his fundraiser.

But now we’ve only heard from one of three candidates. Next, let’s turn on the mikes in the rooms where Hillary Clinton is talking to her backers. And let’s listen in on John McCain wooing those wary evangelicals!

NY Times: Blogging’ll kill ya?

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Matt Richtel is on the front page of today’s Times with a piece about the tech blogosphere as a 24/7 sweatshop — one that might even be killing some of its (older) practitioners.

“It looks like a desk job, but for some bloggers it is more like a factory,” reads the pullquote.

The piece is, I think, reasonably accurate as a portrait of the tiny sliver of the blogging universe that the commercialized tech-news blog world represents. Where it goes awry is in suggesting that this represents the archetypal blogging experience.

This passage is the problem:

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

“Some write for fun.” I think, realistically, this might say, “Most write for fun.” The emphasis now suggests that “a limited number write for fun, but THOUSANDS write for publishers…” To me even “thousands” seems exaggerated — does the pro blogosphere really employ that many?

Leaving that aside, the “some/thousands” construction suggests that the majority of participants are in sweatshop mode, and that’s obviously wrong. This sentence should really read: “Millions write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers…”

Achieving more clarity on this point might have made the piece somewhat less appealing to the page one editors, of course.

More: Matthew Ingram says the Times was just “trolling” for links. Doc Searls points out that “scoops are overrated.” And Marc Andreessen mocks the Times with some other headlines we can look forward to, including “The Bloggers have WMD.”

P.S. I will make $0.00 on this post! And I’m at least 8 hours late with my observations. Then again, I got to drink my coffee before I sat down to write.

LATER: Larry Dignan of ZDNet has some sensible observations similar to some of what I was thinking as I read the Times piece:

Let’s put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let’s get real: If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose.

And Dave Winer points out in a comment below that there’s an element of professional-journalistic defensiveness in the article’s premise:

Of course this piece is aimed at themselves and others like them. Look, we’re being replaced by crazies who work for nothing, never sleep and die of heart attacks.

It’s like NAFTA for professional writers.

A lightweight blog-post draft management system

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[This is a post describing a technique I’ve found useful for managing my blog. Feel free to skip the geek-out!]

For a long time I’ve wished for a better system to manage my blog post drafts. I know there are client side tools like MarsEdit and Ecto, but I use lots of different machines at home and on the road, and prefer to work with one set of drafts on a server.

Recent tweaks to WordPress have allowed you to filter posts based on published/unpublished/draft status — that means you can have a standling link to a list of drafts. That simple capability got me most of where I wanted to be; when I get an idea for a post, I create a placeholder post with a quick note reminding me of the idea. A bookmark on my browser toolbar points to this list of drafts.

The other tool that has made this really useful is Postalicious — a wordpress plugin that creates blog posts based on Delicious tags. I was less happy with Postalicious the first time I used it because I had it set to automatically publish my links — but Delicious has a tight, Twitter-like limit on the number of characters you can use to annotate the links. And I like to gas on sometimes. I’d find myself going into the post after it was published and adding material — awkward at best.

Now I have Postalicious set to create the new posts as drafts. As I’m wandering the Web, when I see something I want to blog about, I tag it appropriately. Then the next time I have a chance to do some blogging, I’ve got a nice list of the links I want to write about waiting for me in my draft list. The URL is right there so if I want to quote at length I can just click right through to it and cut and paste the longer quote that wouldn’t have fit into Delicious.

Sometimes, it’s these simple things that please us users the most!