Why would Associated Press wish to redefine Fair Usage?

There has been a brouhaha this weekend, as Associated Press first sought to sue Bloggers using their stuff (even in linked excerpts) and then appeared to do a one-step-backtrack-two-steps-attack play. As they are finding however (in common with all corporates that come to bury it) , the blogosphere is (i) diffuse and thus hard to silence and (ii) very large and on 24/7, so it can park a myriad of tanks on lawns very fast. And holes in stories are very rapidly pointed out, as here by Scott Rosenberg:

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“suspend their efforts” to intimidate bloggers, yet on the other hand they are saying that “the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items.”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

So why are they doing this - well, as always, it comes down to economics - in this case the real economics of the media. If anyone has read Flat Earth News, they will realise that AP is the middleman between PR agencies and the mainstream media, and blogging threatens to endrun that - as we show in the diagram below:



The precis of the Flat Earth News hypothesis (and its fairly well backed up in the book) is this:

Over the last decade or so, the Mainstream Media has been (i) increasing fatness of papers by adding more articles and (ii) reducing the number of Journalists to write them. But someone has to, and the PRShpere gladly jumped in, offset funded by those who had a Sponsors Message to get out (the irony between a Free Press and a Free (zero cost) press should not be lost on students of FreeConomics). The result is that the PR industry actually writes a huge amount of the stuff you read, never mind the Ads. However, many Journos are still semi-pro and don't swallow the PR spin wholesale. This is where AP and similar news aggregators come in - they are seen by the beleagured Journo as an accredited source, so if the PR fluff comes from them its OK. Thats a nice little business then if you are an AP, which, with even fewer Journos on staff, is allegedly more susceptible to taking the PR fluff on board.

Enter the Blogosphere, and this nice little earner is gone for a bummer - the bloggers will whip your stuff, by pass the paying MSM, and produce the Op Ed to the End User sans $$$, just a bit of link-lurve. Not only that, but the PR-sphere immediately sees an new (and cheaper) option to get their message sent - uncritically filtered by an army of unsophisticated dumb-ass bloggers - and bingo, you have an Unhappy Aggregator.

And now you have an Unhappy Aggregator who doesn't understand how the blogosphere works. Sit back and enjoy the fireworks