AP trap and how to avoid it
A few days ago, Laboratorium broke a story about how AP charges for content (although supposedly not for bloggers). He argues that AP's licensing policy is absurd, whether it's for bloggers or the members of the MSM.
I agree, and I propose a solution: stop using AP's content.
Associated Press has its roots in small newspapers not wanting to pay big newspapers for their story, while still allowing them to cover non-local stories without incurring the great cost of having paid reporters all over the nation. In the case of radio (where there is a similar story about peoplo not wanting to pay a monopolist for royalty) one can say that there's no public domain or alternate sources to dip into and use that as excuse for promoting the oligopolists on radio. But, in the case of news, that shouldn't be our excuse.
With so many bloggers out there, surely there are sources of news closer to the action who haven't handed over their copyright to associated press? Heck, for heaven's sake, we can probably quote and link to news networks, at least for the stories which do not say that AP had anything to do with it.
You hate AP; I hate AP. Let's vote with our feet: stop linking to and quoting AP news. AP will be simply repeating history if it fades into background through draconian copyright enforcement with little respect to fair use or fairness in licensing.