This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 9:56 pm by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Associated Press recently decided that they were going to refuse to be quoted on blogs anymore, insisting that even some 35 word or less quotes were copyright violations. It’s wrong and illegal, they say, to quote them directly without paying them $2.50 per word.
As conversations about current events move online, what the AP seems likely to have done is to just cut themselves out of the link economy. Jeff Jarvis suggests that this could be the end of them.
It’s easy to say that they have every right to control their content as strictly as they want to, fair use be hanged. Though in this information age, that might not be the most ultimately self-interested way to look at the question. Consider the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA.
It could certainly be argued, and it has been, that they were well within their rights to crush file sharing through Napster and repeatedly sue their customers. Just that now, iTunes is eating their lunch. Instead of new musicians looking for how they can get recording contracts, the young artists that should be adding to the vitality of their labels are instead looking for ways to make them irrelevant.
They’ve made themselves hated. They’ve made themselves an obstacle that people want to work around, instead of with. In a time when the developed world is moving towards a relationship economy and away from a transactional economy, reputation is a valuable currency. What have they done to their reputation?
That’s the question the AP should be asking themselves right now.
When other valuable currencies of the day include attention and mindshare, one of the best ways to secure more of them is to be recommended by a trusted intermediary. The friend everyone asks for advice on major purchases. The blogger so many people go to for advice on media and politics. These people function as editorial gateways to a larger audience, to others who’ve come to trust that they’ll presort and filter a larger universe of information and come back with something relevant, something helpful.
The AP has just told a lot of intermediaries that they don’t wish to be part of this reputation economy, that the reputation economy itself is wrong and illegal. That’s what people are going to remember about them now.
Maybe the AP doesn’t deserve the bad rap they’re going to get. But like Clint Eastwood’s character says towards the end of the movie Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
A lot of organizations are struggling with how to change their business models in order to stay afloat as content production becomes a tenuous way to make a living. I empathize, sympathize, even. But the world is changing, and it’s no country for old buggy whip manufacturers.
Leave a Reply
