Betanews is reporting the AP's current plan for dealing with excerpting it's content:
Where the group had previously invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and sent cease-and-desist orders to at least one blogger, seeking the removal of excerpted content (in some cases as few as 17 words in length), now the press service has attached an "Excerpt for Web Use" charge for passages as short as five words in length.
The pricing scale for excerpting AP content begins at $12.50 for 5-25 words and goes as high as $100 for 251 words and up. Nonprofit organizations and educational institutions enjoy a discounted rate.
Betanews brings up many problems to this "solution". I'm going to stick with "you have got to be kidding me", but I recommend that you read the whole thing.
Well, if I have to pay to excerpt from an AP story, then I won't excerpt. And if I can't excerpt then I won't link. At first, I thought they were over-the-top,but now I think that TechCrunch has it right.
So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
UPDATE: Michael Silence says that the AP has earned itself a blogswarm.
Actually, in some ways, the AP should be commended. They have managed to single-handedly unite three very different poles of the blogosphere, the techies, the left, and the right. Something that even a week ago would've seemed impossible.
Unfortunately for the AP, the blogosphere is united against them.
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