Michael Arrington
TechCrunch.com
Thursday, June 19, 2008; 1:09 AM
I’m not normally one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but something is just plain rotten in this whole New York Times/Associated Press/Media Bloggers Association love fest.
As I wrote earlier today, the New York Times just won’t stop defending the Associated Press and their position that quoting from their articles is a copyright infringement (it isn’t). The NYTimes’ Saul Hansell has now written three blog posts and one feature article on the mess, all defending the A.P. None of those articles disclose the NYTimes’ partial ownership or board seat with the A.P.
In the first article, Hansell wrote that the A.P. was negotiating with the Media Bloggers Association to negotiate guidelines around use of A.P. content, even though copyright law already sets forth very clear guidelines on fair use. Any more restrictive measures wouldn’t be enforceable, but the A.P. has shown that it’s willing to use it’s army of lawyers to make life hell for anyone that tries. The easy way out is to simply pay the A.P. for quotations of more than four words.
Throughout Hansell’s posts there is a noticeable lack of criticism towards the A.P., or even recognition that this is a two sided issue. In his third post, this source left a comment basically retracting all the original material. More
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