The Associated Press has dissociated itself from reality. Despite the fact it is not directly threatened by the newspaper meltdown, it’s trying to reshape the Web in its own image. How? Apparently, by putting DRM on plain text… somehow… and tracking it… somehow. (WARNING: Massive pile of JPEG. Scroll it or scale it down.) This is all redolent of the mid-1990s, and not just because the business plan contains two places where logic goes bye-bye for a while. It’s an attempt to force the world to play along with their private but profitable delusions, particularly the delusion that all communications can be controlled by the Associated Press.
Anyway, most people look at the steaming mass of PR above and get a vague sensation about computers and packaging and maybe large drums of toxic waste. When people who know a bit more about the Web look at it, this is what they see. It’s a little NSFW, potentially, but it’s difficult to remain entirely calm when a corporation that has purchased lobbyists thinks that spying on its customers is a valid way forwards. We’ve seen what happens when a corporation thinks that.
Very interesting and disturbing, Derleth. I still don’t get how they can put a tracking “beacon” on plain text… If I copy the text of an AP article, paste it into a plain text editor, then copy and paste into a plain text e-mail, is the article tracked?
Or is it just a image (“clip art” like the second link says) that most intelligent people can just get rid of of they want to share something?
This is where logic goes bye-bye. If it was a movie, I’d tell you it wasn’t a very good movie and to stop putting more thought into it than the screenwriters did. Since the AP doesn’t seem to be joking, my only guess is that the AP wants everyone to only get their news by running the AP’s software that implements all of the AP’s little tricks, like phoning home and limiting the number of copies made and so on.
I think the ‘clip art’ jibe was a reference to the fact the AP used cheap clip art in the little slide they made. Copying images is no more difficult than copying text.
It isn’t so much ‘intelligence’ as ‘knowing it can be done’ and being knowledgeable enough about computers to know the usual weaknesses of such systems (screenshots are commonly helpful, for example).
This is a great example of the growing gap between the computer literate and the rest of the people in the First World. The computer literate have the know-how to live (sometimes markedly) better lives than the rest because of crap like this that’s easy to defeat if you know it can be defeated. It’s going to be up to companies like the AP, with the clout to shove dumb crap like this through to the real world, that determine how much better the literate are going to have it.
The tracker can only be “in the DRM” if everyone agrees to only decrypt the text (DRM is, essentially, an application of encryption) using the AP’s software. That software would do all the phoning home.
Sounds to me like they’ll be embedding a <script> tag into the text of each article. If you include the script tag, it will ping their server and check if you’re a valid content provider. If you’re not, then the lawyers come calling. If you don’t copy the script tag, and just take the text, then they’ll find you via Google searches looking for their own text, and if you’re posting their stuff en masse, then again, they send the lawyers.
Really there’s not a lot more than that they can do, and I don’t see that it adds any major onus. Mostly it just lets them track usage by proper affiliates since the instant they go public, anyone who’s been using some sort of automated content puller will add a filter to remove the script tag.
Sage Rat: It could be that simple. The AP’s problem, though, as the NYTimes piece states, is that it wants to make money from being indexed by search engines: It likes that Google drives people to its site, but it hates that it does so by quoting the headlines it gives its news items. (Google already pays the AP for using whole pieces in Google News. This apparently isn’t about that.) In short, the AP is going up against Google and every other company on the Web that could possibly drive traffic to its website.
This isn’t Rocky calling out Apollo Creed, this is King Canute trying to sweep back the tide. The difference is that Canute was making a point: Not even the king can stop the future.
Also, I really do not see how a simple <script> tag could prevent what the AP apparently wants to prevent. If the AP is serious about stopping Google from ‘stealing’ its [del]thoughts[/del] headlines, it would have to stop Google from indexing them entirely. This is consistent with enshrouding them in an encrypted wrapper, at which point it might as well delete them as soon as they’re written.
I’ll quote from the NYT piece:
Mr. Curley is the AP’s president, chief executive, and corporate officer most likely to do loops on the floor while going ‘woo-woo-woo!’
Sage Rat: If I’d told you a few months ago that Amazon would send copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four purchased for the Kindle down the memory hole, what would you have said?
The idea of getting paid for any use of the company’s content, a notion the NYT attributes to Curley, sounds like a very promising fantasy for an MBA focused on the next quarter’s balance sheet. He could look at the world around him and come up with a plan that, though being less immediately profitable, is better in the long term. The board could also vote to replace him and go with someone who is promising jam tomorrow.
Yes, it’s stupid. No, it will never work like the AP wants it to. However, it sounds like the kind of thing a corporate officer might promise (and then maybe actually try to deliver) to keep the shareholders happy for the next few quarters while the market shakes out.
What is it that you think the Associated Press is trying to do? Because to me, it looks like they’re just using microformats to (1) allow licensees to automate implementing whatever restrictions come along with a given article, and (2) contain distinctive code to catch unauthorized aggregators (which is who the AP wants to shut down, they don’t really care about the guy who now and again lifts an AP-produced paragraph or two for his dumb blog).
The “beacon” talk seems to me to be in terrorem, no different than conspicuous signage at the mall informing you that the premises are under surveillance. A <script> tag could be used, I suppose, a development no more novel than the 1x1 web bugs of ill-repute. And a human user doing a plaintext cut-and-paste will not reproduce these elements.
I don’t know what I get more of a chuckle out of: the AP thinking this will stanch newspapers’ hemorrhaging (which is a serious concern for anyone who cares about responsible journalism, I don’t mean to minimize it) or people thinking plaintext can be DRMed and tracking-beaconed.
In brief, the ACAP is a metadata format like robots.txt (which already tells search engine spiders which parts of a website to stay out of) but with a lot more information to it. The extra information would control things like how many words the search engine is allowed to use, what kind of reformatting is allowed, how long content can be indexed, and whether user ratings or tags can be added to the content on the search engine’s own website, among other things.
There’s no technical method to force anyone to listen to an ACAP file. Hence the law news publishers are trying to push through in the European Union. This is marginally less suicidal than the encryption-heavy scheme I thought they were pursuing (and, for all I know, still may be), but it isn’t going to work unless they can force everyone to obey those laws.
A lawsuit probably would not fly, unless the AP comes to be seen as a competition to the average Twitter user, but the AP doesn’t have a monopoly on news-gathering any more than the late-night talkheads have a monopoly on wool-gathering.
One interesting bit from the Harvard law piece quoted by Derleth:
One question, in this “new media” age, might be: Who, exactly, constitutes AP’s competitors?
While that question might have been pretty easy for the Supreme Court to answer in 1918, the blurring of the line between the media and the general population means that the term “competitor” might, under some circumstances, be defined far more broadly now than it used to be.
Is a blogger one of AP’s competitors, when it comes to the question of misappropriation? What about a search engine? Does it matter if the blogger is blogging for free, as opposed to charging for content? Is a search engine an appropriator of content, or is it merely a conduit?
mhendo: More to the point, do you expect the courts to decide any of those things based on a strong foundation in the relevant technical facts, as opposed to a foundation in the publishing industry’s PR and precedent established when the Telex network was high technology?
So, according to this Ars Technica article (posted 7/28), quotes around “wrapper” are indeed warranted:
Perhaps the AP’s idea is to address this from a common-case viewpoint, providing search engines (and other automated systems) some machine readable content for easy parsing and organization. To a large degree, aggregators would be stupid not to use it, as it would make their job easier. Then use an RIAA-like approach – go after a big, obviously infringing news aggregator as a threat to others. Individuals get away with it…they’re just not important in the larger picture.
Tell the RIAA that. More to the point, remind the AP of that when some individual embarrasses them.
But that isn’t actually what I think will happen. What I think will happen is that the AP will pick up Twitter posts and pictures and video posted online, like news orgs are already doing for stories like the Iranian demonstrations, and ‘own’ them simply by aggregating and republishing. The difference now is that it’s able to enforce the ownership using this metadata scheme.
I have a bit of a different perspective here, having worked at an AP-affiliated radio station for a few years. The AP has ALWAYS been extremely protective of their newswire. You have no idea how many hoops someone has to jump through in order to get their feed. They had dongles we had to connect to our PCs in the newsroom to authenticate ourselves constantly. These were assigned to specific computers and wouldn’t work anywhere else. They’d been doing this for years, and this was over a decade ago.
The AP is in a very competitive business, and if their wire reports get hijacked, they’re out of business. They have ALWAYS taken a VERY proactive stance on protecting their news distribution channel. No one who hasn’t paid their license fee get the feed, and the feed was pretty much read-only. That’s how they roll, that’s how they’ve rolled for years. In the broader age of rapid proliferation of news through many uncontrolled sources, I can believe they’re struggling to retain their old ways.
