# A difference in worldview (AP vs. the Web)

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 25, 2009, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192 "2009-07-25T03:16:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 18\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/1 "2009-07-25T03:16:28Z")

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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.](http://www.ap.org/media/images/APnewsregistry.jpg) (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.](http://imgur.com/DzZdf.jpg) 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.

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**Author:** ![Green\_Cymbeline](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_cymbeline/32/9244_2.png) [@Green\_Cymbeline](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Cymbeline)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/2 "2009-07-25T05:06:50Z")

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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 really stupid.

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**Author:** ![phi2dao](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@phi2dao](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phi2dao)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/3 "2009-07-25T05:24:38Z")

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> [@nyctea scandiaca](#):
>
> 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 really stupid.

It looks like tracker might be something in the DRM.  
Maybe it phones home when it gets decrypted or something?

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/4 "2009-07-25T05:40:17Z")

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> [@nyctea scandiaca](#):
>
> 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?

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.

> [@](#):
>
> Or is it just a image (“clip art” like the second link says)

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.

> [@](#):
>
> that most intelligent people can just get rid of of they want to share something?

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.

> [@phi2dao](#):
>
> It looks like tracker might be something in the DRM.  
> Maybe it phones home when it gets decrypted or something?

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.

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**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 7:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/5 "2009-07-25T07:05:08Z")

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Here’s a [more comprehensive description](http://www.pcworld.com/article/168991/murky_waters_the_aps_new_content_protection_plan.html) of the plan. And here’s a [New York Times article](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/media/24content.html) on the subject.

This all seems pretty misguided to me.

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**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 7:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/6 "2009-07-25T07:38:21Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/7 "2009-07-25T10:01:20Z")

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**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:

> [@](#):
>
> “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

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!’

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**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/8 "2009-07-25T18:06:09Z")

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The NY Times is almost certainly making shit up. AP would have to be dumber than a beanbag to not want to get indexed by Google.

Yes, I know that we’re always supposed to fear the levels of stupidity to which mankind can go, but I still don’t buy it.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/9 "2009-07-25T22:00:44Z")

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**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.

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**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/10 "2009-07-25T22:13:44Z")

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> [@Derleth](#):
>
> **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?

Wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Revoking something you had no right to sell and refunding money is something that happens every day.

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**Author:** ![Kimmy\_Gibbler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Kimmy\_Gibbler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimmy_Gibbler)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/11 "2009-07-25T23:46:55Z")

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> [@Derleth](#):
>
> **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.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/12 "2009-07-25T23:48:30Z")

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> [@Sage\_Rat](#):
>
> Wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Revoking something you had no right to sell and refunding money is something that happens every day.

You wouldn’t have blinked an eye that Amazon would give the lazy news flacks of the world such a free meal?

Anyway, I think I’ve found something quite relevant to our discussion: [News publishers, including the AP, are trying to push something called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP)](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2008/01/skeptical-look-at-acap.ars), and it [looks like it might become law in the EU.](http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/07/european-publishers-want-news-access-controls-legislated.ars)

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.

[The AP isn’t fighting copyright infringement. It’s fighting misappropriation, which is much broader.](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/ap-launches-campaign-against-internet-misappropriation.ars) Misappropriation gives them a short-term monopoly on the facts contained in the news report, making it a violation of the law to do things like read a wire report and paraphrase it for your own distribution. [I’ll misappropriate something from Harvard, because otherwise nobody would believe me](http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/linking/doctrine/index.html):

> [@](#):
>
> The common law doctrine of misappropriation originates in the 1918 Supreme Court opinion, [International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215.](http://cyber.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/linking/doctrine/ins.html) International News Service (INS) and Associated Press (AP) were two competing news services that employed correspondents to gather and report news worldwide.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> The problem arose when INS was barred from transmitting wartime information from Great Britain. Since news of the war was a hot commodity, INS began “lifting” AP’s stories from AP’s bulletin boards, and from early editions of AP-affiliated newspapers on the East Coast. An INS reporter would take the reported information, write an article in his own words, and the new article would be wired to INS-affiliated papers for publication. Sometimes this resulted in INS “scooping” AP’s West Coast affiliates, if the INS edition came out on the West Coast before the AP edition.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> The Supreme Court granted the relief AP was seeking, and the misappropriation doctrine was born. In Justice Pitney’s majority opinion, he found that AP had a quasi-property right in the news that it had gathered. This right existed not against the world at large, because news is based on unprotectable facts, but against competitors.

This is well and good, except it [looks like the AP is calling the kettle black:](http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/07/european-publishers-want-news-access-controls-legislated.ars)

> [@](#):
>
> I’m the last person who wants to add to the Twitter hype, but copying the news off the wire and doing a write-through sounds a whole lot like what the big news orgs do to Twitter when a pop star dies or military jets overfly NYC.

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.

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**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2009, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/13 "2009-07-26T00:05:54Z")

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One interesting bit from the Harvard law piece quoted by **Derleth** :

> [@](#):
>
> The Supreme Court granted the relief AP was seeking, and the misappropriation doctrine was born. In Justice Pitney’s majority opinion, he found that AP had a quasi-property right in the news that it had gathered. This right existed not against the world at large, because news is based on unprotectable facts, but against competitors.

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?

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2009, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/14 "2009-07-26T01:55:14Z")

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**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?

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**Author:** ![athelas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5e9695/32.png) [@athelas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/athelas)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2009, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/15 "2009-07-26T02:20:15Z")

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Relevant to this discussion: [Why did no one inform us about the death of the American newspaper industry?](http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/why_did_no_one_inform_us_of_the)

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**Author:** ![Digital\_Stimulus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Digital\_Stimulus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digital_Stimulus)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2009, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/16 "2009-07-29T22:21:22Z")

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So, according to [this Ars Technica article](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/drm-for-news-inside-the-aps-plan-to-wrap-its-content.ars) (posted 7/28), quotes around “wrapper” are indeed warranted:

> [@](#):
>
> The “wrappers” and “digital permissions frameworks” that it hopes to implement sound like tough encryption, but they aren’t. Instead, the AP is simply relying on a newly-developed microformat called hNews. It’s a simple HTML-based tagging scheme for marking up news content and making headlines, author names, and permitted uses machine-readable and search-engine friendly.

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.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2009, 7:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/17 "2009-07-30T07:04:22Z")

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> [@Digital\_Stimulus](#):
>
> 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.

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**Author:** ![Mtgman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5a626/32.png) [@Mtgman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mtgman)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2009, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-difference-in-worldview-ap-vs-the-web/504192/18 "2009-07-30T16:24:05Z")

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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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle#Copy_protection) 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.

Enjoy,  
Steven