Extra! AP Declares War On Internet!

#Bloggers ap #censorship
In June, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort. The Retort claimed that citing an AP article falls under the fair use law. The AP insists that any citation other than a link constitutes plagiarism under the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (full text in PDF format here). Under the new AP copyright policy, it is forbidden to copy even one word from an AP article without payment. The cost for quoting? $2.50 per word!

You know what this means.

The Associated Press has declared war against the Internet.

Attention fellow bloggers! You can't quote from AP articles unless you want your asses to get sued for cost plus damages, and maybe even get thrown in jail for plagiarism (under the fascist DMCA, of course) while you're at it! So do what TechCrunch does, among others: ban AP! If you want to blog or tweet a news story, look at the byline; if it says "Associated Press" or "AP", do not blog or tweet it if you don't want the cartel suing you for copyright violations! This goes not just for newspaper websites, but also for such aggregators as Google News and the Huffington Post. I went even further: I blocked all of AP's accounts on Twitter, starting with @AP.

AP is a cartel not of our time. If you go to their history page, you'll find that it was started in 1846. It's nineteenth-century, folks! Older than the RIAA, the MPAA, and similar 20th-century media cartels! The newspaper cartel known as the Associated Press was founded in 1846. Its war against the blogs and news aggregators betrays the fact that its collective mentality is stuck in the 19th century.

Face it: the newspaper industry is dying. There's even a Newspaper Death Watch keeping track of the death of the industry. Like the RIAA's relentless fascist jihad against music file traders, AP's decision reflects the desperation of the so-called "mainstream media" (MSM) conglomerates and the print news outlets they own. Several newspaper publishers are even going so far as to make their websites accessible only through paid subscriptions — as if that would get them more viewers.

As with the now hated RIAA, the members of the AP are dying. They are trying to prevent the inevitable extinction of their medium by punishing the Internet. Great move, MSM. Just the thing that will accelerate your demise. As of April 6, the Associated Press has officially jumped the shark. Only decline is ahead of it now, before it inevitably ceases to exist, along with the entire industry it represents.

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