Old Media Tries to Sue to Keep Old Paradigm (again)

With newspapers failing right and left, the Associated Press decided the best way to fight the web is to sue it. Sounds like the record industry and we all know how well that turned out…

The Associated Press board voted recently to “pursue legal and legislative actions” against aggregators who use content without permission, a new shot across the bow of internet news sites in the war over how little use is “fair use.”

According to the article AP to Aggregators: We Will Sue You they want companies like Google who only show a headline or two to pay.

According to an article called A.P. to Take On Web Aggregators

One goal of The A.P. and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work of news organization.

Neither Mr. Singleton nor a statement released by the A.P. mentioned Google or any other company by name. But many news executives, including some at The A.P., have spoken about their concern that their work has become a source of revenue for Google and, to a lesser extent, other aggregators, which can sell ads on search pages and news sites that turn up articles. At a time when newspaper revenue is collapsing and some papers are closing, the prospect of getting a share of revenue from Yahoo or Google is more tempting than ever.

So, we’ll see if this works better for the print industry than the record industry or publishing industry or… come on, suing people who guide traffic to your site?

I promise here not to sue anyone who links to any of my blog posts…really I won’t sue you.
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