The Real Problem with AP

There's a ton of buzz on the blogs today about the AP's decision to threaten bloggers with lawsuits merely for quoting a small part of an AP story.

Of course, as Atrios and Kos make clear, the AP is on the wrong side of copyright law, which allows limited copying for "fair use."

So why is AP acting so stupidly? AP critics assume AP just doesn't "get" the culture of the Internet. In fact, the opposite is true. AP "gets" Internet culture completely - they just cannot accept it.

Most AP readers assume AP is just a low-profile news service. But on key national security issues, AP is an integral part of the U.S. government's propaganda - hence the nickname "American Propaganda."

The "giveaway" that AP isn't really a news organization is the simple fact that AP customers (the newspapers and websites that pay for its stories) cannot archive AP stories. Instead, after a few days they disappear into a "memory hole" straight out of Orwell's "1984."

So you can see the problem that the Internet presents to the AP's propaganda efforts - we can archive the articles that the AP wants to disappear.

Now that the battle is joined, we'll see how this all plays out. I think AP will fight hard for the legal power to "disappear" its articles. If they can't win that battle in court, they will probably turn to Congress for expanded powers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.