The dickwads at the Associated Press

A bunch of stupid bullies who don’t understand the concepts of “fair use” and “internet” (or more likely, understand them very well but don’t like them), think they have enough clout to dictate terms. Well, the millions and millions and billions of Wetmachine readers will have to find their own way to AP stories from now on. I’m not going to link to them. Take that, you wankers!

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4 Comments

JohgMc
June 14, 2008 at 12:39 pm

As Open Source Journalism continues to grow, the shoe will be on the other foot in about 10 years. Then when AP wants to source a story from some video blog they will get sued. Which by the way Michael Yon did that very thing against Reuters.
John
June 14, 2008 at 12:46 pm

As I understand things, AP was people who quoted a few sentences and then linked to the AP site.

I’ve seen a bunch of people who have been extremely liberal in their interpretation of “fair use” with respect to some Wetmachine articles from time to time. It would be more annoying if a giant concern like AP did it. But if AP wants to quote a few sentences from a Wetmachine article and include a link to the original, that’s fine by me. That’s the whole idea of the web, for Pete’s sake.
Stearns
June 14, 2008 at 5:06 pm

I don’t think we should boycott: I think every blogger should link to as many AP stories as possible! Maybe write a little script to generate the links automatically. Put up an RSS aggregation. Quote like hell.

Make them pay a fortune for unproductive legal action. And after bloggers jointly raise their AP’s Page Rank in Google, how are they going to claim damages?
Harold
June 16, 2008 at 5:16 pm

Yes, I agree that it is a much better form of social protest to link like crazy than to boycott links. Stick it to them!

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The dickwads at the Associated Press

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