Associated Press Charges Bloggers For Quoting
So apparently this is what the Associated Press considers fair use. Quoting 4 words or less can be done for free (that’s practically not even a quote), quoting 5-25 words will cost you $12.50, quoting 26-50 words will cost $17.50, quoting 51-100 words will cost you $25, quoting 101-250 will cost $50, and 251 words and up is $100.
Do they really expect this to work?
Unfortunately for AP there are too many blogs for them to look through to make sure everyone is following the rules, obviously they could just sue the big guys until the little guys get scared but that is no way to do business (we’re learning that from the music industry right now).
I think every blogger has their own rules for what is and what isn’t acceptable, I for instance believe that I can quote no more than 3 sentences and afterward must give a link to the original story. Some may consider 3 sentences to be too long but I think that any less (in most circumstances) wouldn’t be able to give enough context and someone would be able to twist the quote into meaning something else.
I think the AP is still trying to live in the newspaper world, and now that they can’t control where they’re content is going (like they could by licensing it to newspapers) they are getting scared. Of course they shouldn’t be scared because the only rule they should have is that people link back, meaning that when someone looks for that story because other places are linking to AP, AP will always show up higher in search engines.
Bottom line is that they are going about it all wrong and I wouldn’t be surprised if people completely disregard these rules (as they have been for a long time) and just do whatever they feel is right.
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