Conservative Politics Today

BY: VIRGINIA H. SHANAHAN

In a heavy-handed move that affects bloggers everywhere, the AP is attempting to set guidelines for bloggers that go above and beyond all U.S. Copyright infringement and Fair Use Laws. The AP, one of the nations largest news outlets, sent a DMCA letter to The Drudge Retort owner, Roger Cadenhead, (not to be confused with the Drudge Report), demanding he remove seven items from his website, that contained quotes from AP articles. The quotes ranged in length from 33 to 79 words.

According to AP Vice President Jim Kennedy they will issue guidelines telling bloggers what is acceptable and what isn’t. They will “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.” Apparently Mr Kennedy believes the AP to be above and beyond U.S. law.

In a New York Times article today, Mr Kennedy is cited as saying “We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this.” He goes on ““Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see. It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context. This all sounds reasonable, yet the AP has not revoked their unreasonable demands that the Drudge Retort remove these seven items from it’s site.

Due to these extreme behaviors of the AP, it is now the policy of this website that there will be no AP articles cited, or linked to. Until such time the AP decides it will not attempt to bully bloggers, and override the rule of law, this policy will remain in effect.

I am joining my fellow professional bloggers in this non-partisan boycott of the AP, and I hope all bloggers, professional or not, will join in.

Sign the petition