Would someone please give the AP the facepalm
Even within archaic systems and services there are some that are even more out of touch with reality and do everything they can to perpetuate old and outdated ways of doing things. The Associated Press (AP) is one of those services and they have proven yet once again just how out of touch both they and management heavy news organizations are.
Rather than finding ways to make their content more useful, and as a result more valuable, they like much of the old media are struggling to find ways to keep everything within the existing status quo of where they control the dissemination of other people’s interpretation of the events happening around us – otherwise known as …. the news. Along those lines Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Director and vice chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group Inc (wow that’s a mouthful isn’t it), announced today that the AP would be creating a news registry that would allow them to tag and track all their content to make sure that those useless lying sacks of industry destroying bloggers everyone is in compliance of the AP “terms of use”.
The idea of course is that this way given their exclusive microformat the AP can control who can use their content and how much of that content they can use.
“The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content,” the announcement explained. “The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.”
The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.
Source: Editor Publisher :: AP To Create Registry to ‘Track’ and Protect Online Content
As PaidContent noted on their post this is going to piss off a whole lot of people
This is sure to raise a howl from people who a) don’t like efforts to manage content use, b) don’t like the idea of tracking and c) don’t like anything AP does when it comes to trying to protect content. (We’ll also probably hear a lot about genies and bottles.) AP is trying to position it as not being about Google or bloggers, but about giving news orgs tools to enhance and protect revenue—and as an alternative to going completely behind a pay wall.
