Idea Lab

AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: • All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc. • The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted...

• September 21, 2009
• 6 comments

AP Takes on Drudge Retort Over Copyright Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Associated Press ("AP") sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material. The Drudge Retort is a community site similar to Digg and Reddit, allowing its users to...

• June 16, 2008
• 10 comments

Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to next week's launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post, which discusses copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media, is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because the primer is too long for me to republish here, I've included just a summary.  If you are interested in reading more, the entire...

• January 25, 2008
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