Wait, A Reasonable Copyright Holder?

The Associated Press today announced it was going to start using a digital framework of sorts to track when people copy the AP's content without permission.1 This at first sent tremors of "uh-oh" here at Squishy Mind Property until we read further into the article. The program is aimed at stopping those mass aggregators who rip off large amounts of AP content, not little bloggers like us.2 So we breathed a sigh of relief. Granted we at SMP try to cite our sources as best we can and definitely refrain from outright copying, plagiarism, etc.

Technically speaking, the AP is absolutely correct, that anyone who wishes to use their actual stories (the text article the AP created) MUST get a license from the AP.3 The distribution right has been long established to be one of those exclusive rights of a copyright holder.4 The preamble to 106 provides the AP can publish/distribute OR authorize said publication and distribution.5 So all that being said, I have to say that the AP is taking the exact opposite approach the RIAA has used (until recently). But I think part of this may be related to an old Supreme Court case involving the AP.6 In Associated Press v. International News Service,7 the Court found that the "news" itself was not copyrightable, but the expression of the news was.8 In this way, the AP is acting within the Copyright Act and the AP decision. They have all the right to go after the little guy in this case, but so far they are choosing not to and for that, I applaud them as a reasonable party in this current struggle to make sense of the digital domain and the future of copyright law.

1: Debra Weiss, AP to Crack Down on Use of Its Content, ABA JOURNAL, July 24, 2009, available at http://www.abajournal.com/news/ap_to_crack_down_on_use_of_its_content.
2: Id. ("[T]he intent was to deter those who engage in large-scale copying of AP content rather than bloggers who use too many paragraphs from an AP story.").
3: 17 U.S.C. § 106(1), (3) (2006).
4: Id. at 106(3).
5: Id. at § 106.
6: Associated Press v. Int'l News Serv., 248 U.S. 215 (1918).
7: 248 U.S. 215 (1918).
8: Id. at 234-35.