AHN Media has agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the Associated Press to settle a lawsuit in which the AP accused AHN of rewriting AP stories and putting AHN's name on them, the companies announced on Monday.
In the settlement, AHN admitted to improperly using AP content in many instances, according to a joint news release published on the AP Web site.
AHN, which stands for All Headline News, also acknowledges that "the tort of 'hot news misappropriation' has been upheld by other courts and was ruled applicable in this case by U.S. District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel," the companies said.
AHN could not be reached late on Monday and the AP declined to comment further. The case was dismissed June 15, according to Paid Content.
In an effort to protect its intellectual property rights as the journalism industry transitions from the traditional paper-based model to the digital realm where copying and redistributing content is as easy as cut and paste, AP has sent take-down notices to blog sites and sued VeriSign's Moreover news aggregation service. That case was settled.
In the AHN lawsuit, the AP had cited the principle of "hot news," in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1918 that there is a quasi-property right in breaking news and found AP competitor International News Service guilty of unfair competition. The judge in the AHN case earlier in the year had said there could be a valid hot news claim in the case.
The fact that AHN agreed to acknowledge the hot news principle won't necessarily affect other cases, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who specializes in intellectual property.
The case "does send a message that the AP is serious about this hot news theory," he said. "Most intellectual property experts view hot news as a very narrow doctrine and the AP is going to have a very hard time protecting all its assets with hot news."
The proliferation of blog sites will make it particularly difficult, von Lohmann said. "The AP needs to be careful lest they end up in the same shoes as the recording industry with tens of millions of targets with no effective way to enforce" the doctrine, he said.
Updated April 9 at 10:55 a.m. PDT with AP comment.
Maybe the Associated Press can file this one under "That's news to me."
At least one representative of the venerable news agency, which recently declared that it was tired of the Internet riding on its coattails, was apparently unaware the agency had an official YouTube video channel.
The Associated Press' official YouTube channel includes codes for embedding videos on other sites.
(Credit: YouTube)The AP recently sent a letter to WTNQ-FM in Tennessee--an affiliate of the Associated Press, by the way--accusing the country music radio station of copyright violation for embedding videos from the AP's official YouTube channel on its Web site, according to a station employee's blog. The AP channel includes embed code for its videos, which allows any Web site or blog to embed the videos on their sites--a feature that can be turned off.
Separately, on Monday the Associated Press said that it would go after news aggregators and other Web sites that "walk off with our work under misguided legal theories."
Frank Strovel, WTNQ's operations manager, writes in a blog that the station received the following message from the AP's regional radio representative in Chicago:
I noticed you are posting our video content with out a license and have to ask you to remove the AP video content from the site ASAP. If you would like to know more about our web services please contact me.
"Not exactly a cease and desist letter, but the point is the same," Strovel said.
Strovel, who said he was "stunned" by the letter, called the representative to discuss the matter. Here is Strovel's version of how the conversation went:
I said, "How is it a violation of a license agreement if you are actively posting the video on YouTube--on a channel you specifically created to share content--with embed codes for people to post in their websites? Are you telling me that you put it there for people to use......but if they USE IT they're violating your rights?"
The basic reply was, "Well, I'll have to investigate that issue further but in the meantime you need to pull all of our videos off your site."
Strovel said he pulled the videos on Tuesday but called the representative back on Wednesday for answers to his questions.
"He still had no answer as to why they are posting content on YouTube for embedding when it's apparently a crime to do so," Strovel said. "I still want an answer to my original question and so far they are baffled and cannot give me one. They actually seemed to act like they didn't even know they had a YouTube channel!"
An AP representative on Thursday characterized the episode as a "misunderstanding."
"There was a misunderstanding of YouTube usage when the Tennessee radio station was contacted by the Associated Press regarding the AP's more extensive online video services," Paul Colford, the AP's director of media relations, said in a statement provided to CNET News. "No cease and desist letter was drafted or sent by AP to the station at any time. The AP was trying to offer the station a superior service for their needs."
News of the exchange began spreading Tuesday after Strovel Twittered about the station's predicament. The news was picked up by the Knoxville News and then by local video producer Christian Grantham, who conducted the following video interview with Strovel:
[Via TechCrunch]
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera says lots of people in print journalism know aggregating news is fair but said "this knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership."
(Credit: Gabe Rivera)Updated at 3:40 p.m. PDT to include Wall Street Journal's deals for some of the news that it aggregates.
Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a "parasite" or "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet."
The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it's unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On the same day that Thomson made his comments, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the The Associated Press, sized up how many in print journalism feel about sites that aggregate news: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore."
But Gabe Rivera, who founded Techmeme, a popular tech-news aggregation site, suggests that Techmeme displays only a short snapshot of a story. This, says Rivera, serves only to promote the content.
"All successful Web publishers want their content quoted and linked," Rivera wrote in an e-mail to CNET News. "The benefits are clear. Some prefer that the quotes remain short...these are precisely the kind that Google and Techmeme use. So for AP and News Corp. to discourage quoting is a clue that they don't really get the Web and are in danger of shooting themselves in the foot."
Rivera also noted that the Journal and The New York Times also aggregate news.
"It's illuminating to observe that both WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators," Rivera wrote. "Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership."
The Journal and Times do have cooperative exchanges with some publications. Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, operates the Factiva service, a database of business stories and other information, which has financial arrangements with numerous news outlets. But the Journal does aggregate some Web content without compensating owners, according to a source with knowledge of the company's business partnerships.
On Tuesday, Google defended itself and other aggregation sites in a blog post.
"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," wrote Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray on Google's blog. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rights' holder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."
Both Thomsom and Singleton hinted that their companies may consider mounting legal challenges to sites that package news stories without permission.
A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.
The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.
"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."
As for the AP, Macgillivray noted that Google already pays the wire service to reprint its articles and photographs. A dispute several years ago led to this agreement.
Of course, Google News is far from the only aggregator out there. Digg, Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post are also big players. But Google is unquestionably at the top.
For the past few years, as many mainstream media outlets (particularly on the print side) began to lose revenue, influence, and readership, some of them had a pretty clear message: blame Google. At the same time, Viacom still has a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google's YouTube over pirated video content. And much of the publishing industry is far from signing on to Google's book digitization initiative.
With struggling newspapers in a panic over whether offering content online for free might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Google--the ultimate source of free content--is an even easier target.
But Google says it's part of the solution, not the problem, and insists that its search and aggregation products only serve to help drive traffic to online news sites.
"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray said in his post. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international--day and night."
Traditional media is once again rattling sabers in the direction of Google and other sites that aggregate news stories.
There's tough talk coming from managers at The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press that include threats of legal challenges and even name calling.
"There is no doubt that certain Web sites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet," Robert Thomson, the Journal's editor, was quoted in Australian newspaper The Australian on Monday. "It's certainly true that readers have been socialized--wrongly I believe--that much content should be free...And there is no doubt that's in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception. And they have little incentive to recognize the value they are trading on that's created by others."
William Dean Singleton
(Credit: Media News Group)Also on Monday, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP, the century-old news wire agency, said at the group's annual meeting in San Diego, "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," according to a copy of Singleton's statements posted to the company's Web site. "We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more."
Google has long said that it provides news site owners with a means to block the search engine from crawling their sites and indexing headlines. "Those who publish on the Web have a lot of control over which pages should appear in search results," Google said in a blog post. "The key is a simple file called robots.txt that has been an industry standard for many years. It lets a site owner control how search engines access their Web site."
The statements from the AP and Journal coming on the same day may have some people questioning whether there is a concerted effort going on within traditional media. There's not according to a spokesman for the Journal.
Regardless, the statements from two stalwart print publications raises questions about whether Google will be forced to open up a new front against yet another group of copyright owners. The search engine is currently defending itself against a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed in 2007 by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures.
Google's plan to scan orphan books and preserve them in a database is also being challenged. Google has an agreement with the The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to scan the books, but a group called Consumer Watchdog says the agreement is anticompetitive and has called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to intervene.
In the case of the AP, Google has an agreement to use the news service's content. That is perhaps why Singleton, who is also CEO of MediaNews Group--the fourth-largest newspaper company in the United States in terms of circulation--didn't mention the company in the speech by name. A company spokesman said that the AP and the more than 1,000 newspapers that own the service, just want Google's help fighting the "misappropriation of content."
Besides Google, sites such as Digg, The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and Techmeme are just a few of those that aggregate headlines from news sources and post them on their sites. Google takes a headline and a description of the story but readers must click through to the news source's site to obtain the full story.
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