The founder of Woot, Matt Rutledge, may be a wealthier man following
Amazon.com's acquisition of his company, but that isn't stopping him from
sending a clear message to the Associated Press: you owe me $17.50. Why
does the AP owe Rutledge? According to Rutledge, AP violated his
copyright when they included a quote from Rutledge's email to Woot
employees in their story about the acquisition.
The quote: "For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk."
Using the iCopyright AP licensing calculator, Rutledge determined that the total value of these words, by AP standards, was $17.50, and in a tongue-in-cheek blog post, suggested that the AP buy a set of Sennheiser In-Ear headphones as payment for them. After all, the news organization was infringing his copyright and needs to pay up to avoid legal action!
TechCrunch blogger MG Siegler spotted Rutledge's post and tried to turn it into a 'story'. Paul Colford, the AP's Director of Media Relations, apparently didn't like Siegler had wrote and responded in a somewhat edgy manner. Which, as one might suspect, earned the AP another TechCrunch story.
Unfortunately, while Rutledge's poke at the AP may be somewhat amusing, Siegler makes a mountain out of a mole hill. That's because, all things considered, the AP's 'lifting' of a 16-word quote from Rutledge's 1,100+ word email is a perfect example of 'fair use' under United States law.
Of course, the AP was a prime target for Rutledge's blog post given past reports that it was looking to extract $2.50/word from bloggers. Those reports, the AP claimed, were inaccurate. Even so, AP in many cases does have a legitimate reason to complain. Some bloggers do employ large excerpts from AP stories instead of taking the time to craft original descriptions of events and news stories. In some cases, a reasonable person would question whether these excerpts represent 'fair use' or copyright infringement.
At the end of the day, there is a real debate to be had over fair use, and hot news as well. And it's not a one-way street: traditional news organizations are increasingly incorporating information from online sources and they can take too much without permission just as easily as a blogger can. Unfortunately, the type of squabbling described here isn't going to facilitate a serious discussion about these issues and frankly makes both Old Media and New Media look petty and self-righteous.
Photo credit: r-z via Flickr.
Patricio Robles is a tech reporter at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter.
11:36AM on 8th July 2010
Being someone who has had almost entire blog posts lifted and essentially plagiarized I am less than sanguine about this kind of lifting. As you say, let's call a spade a spade :) Suffice to say, one idiot who lifted an entire article and images, got the shock of his life :)
11:04PM on 8th July 2010
I'm very glad that you decided to leave out that AP charges per word for quotations of its articles conveniently forgetting that stuff about "fair use."
Tech Reporter at Econsultancy
4:04PM on 9th July 2010
Jon,
As noted in my post, AP has stated unequivocally that past reports of plans to charge bloggers $2.50/word were inaccurate.
Furthermore, on this very blog, we have quoted AP before without problem. Here's an example that's similar in length to the quote the AP took from the Woot blog. To the best of my knowledge, no boogeyman from the AP contacted us because a reasonable person would see such a small quote for what it is: fair use.
As I wrote, there's a real debate to be had around fair use, hot news, etc. But pretending that there's an issue around the use of small quotes/excerpts that are almost indisputably fair use detracts from a meaningful discussion.