901am

New Media News Every Morning

Associated Press Commits Automated Fraud

By

Associated PressThe copyright-trolling insanity of the Associated Press continues. After quoting bloggers Dave Zatz and Danny Sullivan, they’re now charging both bloggers for quoting themselves. As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, blogger James Grimmelmann got the AP’s automated form to charge him for the public-domain words of Thomas Jefferson.

Seriously, AP, this is getting silly. Keep up your ignorant copyright-trolling, and savvy bloggers will just troll you right back. Never mind the argument for fair use: charging people for quoting themselves is just stupid. Charging for content you don’t own, through an automated form or otherwise, is plain and simple fraud.

Originally posted on August 4, 2009 @ 10:47 am

Boycott the Associated Press!

By

Ban APAssociated Press stories have long been banned from my personal blog because of their copyright-trolling ways, but now they’ve hit a new low. Now they’re implementing DRM wrappers around their content and cracking down on anyone who so much as quotes a headline and links to an article without paying a fee.

AP CEO Tom Curley clearly does not grasp the referral economy of the Web. Hey, if he doesn’t want link love, then I sure as Hell won’t give him any. I have better things to do than give him my Google juice and get sued for it.

So do you. Don’t ever link to these copyright trolls. Don’t direct your audience’s hard-earned attention to people who will only charge you for it. If you really must talk about an AP story, Google up some alternative coverage from their many more clued-in competitors. Boycott the Associated Press.

Originally posted on July 25, 2009 @ 6:25 am

AP launches mobile news network for BlackBerry

By

The Associated Press launched a new Mobile News Network client application optimized for BlackBerry smart phones from Research In Motion (RIM).

Launched in May, the award-winning Mobile News Network is a multimedia news portal providing anytime access to international, national and local news content from an unrivalled network of local media sources. With the emergence of innovative smart phone devices, AP wanted to offer a tailored version of the Mobile News Network for BlackBerry smart phone users on the go.

The Mobile News Network is the first product released by AP’s Digital Cooperative, an initiative aimed at finding new digital outlets for news and information produced by AP members.

The launch of the BlackBerry smart phone version follows AP’s recently announced milestones that the Mobile News Network received more than 16 million page views and more than one million local stories were read in the month of August. For the month of September, the Mobile News Network received more than 26 million page views and more than 1.5 million local stories were read.

Originally posted on October 20, 2008 @ 3:25 pm