Say Anything Blog

The Associated Press, with their recent decision that their articles are somehow exempt from Fair Use and that bloggers should pay them to quote them on the net, has done the impossible.

They’ve managed to make both sides of the ideological line furious at them.

I don’t know who at the AP got the brainstorm to try to bulldoze bloggers like this, but whoever did has given them bad advice. Links to their stories in mainstream publications bring readers to their door. And if bloggers stop linking, many, many people stop reading. Right now bloggers from both sides are starting to boycott the AP.

Here’s an few examples of the anger that’s sweeping through the net. From the lib site Newshoggers:

We’ll individually cease linking to AP as a self-protection measure and collectively do so as a boycott because it plays to our strengths and will get attention on the issue - with the small bloggers correctly cast in the role of underdogs.

[...]

Update: Here’s what the brave new blogging world according to AP appears to consist of - we should pay them $2.50 a word to excerpt their stories.

Bugger that.

You can look around and find similar sentiments just about anywhere on the net right now, including here on this site.

Even the far left Daily Kos is outraged over this, but the chief Kossack, the ultra far left Kos himself, isn’t taking this with a grain of salt:

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP—an organization famous for taking its members work without credit—will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn’t get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they’ll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

On the other side of the coin Patterico wonders why its okay for the AP to quote him but its not okay for anyone else to quote the AP:

Now, in a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

Will he quit using AP reports? No:

And I’m going to go on quoting AP stories, within fair use guidelines.

And if they start threatening me, I’ll have to remind them that they did the same to me.

A while back I had an incident where two loudmouthed morning talk show radio hosts, Walton and Johnson, read one of my pieces on the air and posted it on their website without linking me or attributing the column to anyone but themselves. When I and some others contacted them they basically told us, tough, have a nice day.

When that hit the blogs conservative bloggers around the net picked up on it and ran with it. They pulled down the article.

That was just a few conservative bloggers picking up on a cause. The AP has managed to piss off bloggers on both sides and not just a few, as in my case. A lot. I think they’re about to learn a hard lesson.

They’re not the biggest fish in the pond any more.

And I never thought I’d do this, but thanks to the above mentioned Newshoggers for the leads. Elitist mainstream arrogance like this from the AP makes strange bedfellows indeed.