The Associated Press is suing news-aggregation site Moreover and its parent company VeriSign for copyright infringement for snippeting and linking to its news. What does this mean to you...to the ActiveRain community...to bloggers everywhere???
If the courts agree with Associated Press then a "can of worms" would be opened...yep...that's right, if the courts side with AP that would mean that no one can link with another news article or site without their permission...notice I linked to Moreover, but not to AP ;)
Read item number 6 of their legal filing below:
6. Defendants are also trespassing on AP's chattel by using search robots or "crawlers" to retrieve information form AP's computer servers in order to display, archive, cache, store, and/or distribute AP's proprietary works.
Based on this legal filing, search engines are in violation because they "crawl" websites to obtain information and index sites.
AP states that Moreover doesn't alter headlines or leads of their articles. The complaint states:
41. Thus, Exhibits F - J show that Defendants are simply copying AP's proprietary material, including the headline and all or a portion of the lead, and delivering it on a real-time basis to their paying subscribers and other users.
Funny, because by linking to AP, Moreover provides direct links to AP and to AP websites for every article, thus sourcing where the information was obtained. I have never heard of someone suing over free advertisement...the type of advertising that helps rank them in search engines.
I don't know about you, but isn't blogging a lot like writing a persuasive paper, a report, an analysis, etc.? Weren't we all brought up in school systems that taught us how to cite our sources? I was. This lawsuit is ridiculous and absurd. When writing a blog or publishing any content on a website linking eliminates the need for a works cited page, because the work being cited has a direct link to the original author.
What makes more sense?
In his most recent book, It Sounded Good at the Time, Carl Martens states, "...releasing one million lady bugs into the high school seemed like a really good Senior prank" he goes on later to state that the lesson learned was that you can outrun a cop, but that you can't outrun a Motorola.
or
In his most recent book, It Sounded Good at the Time, Carl Martens states, "...releasing one million lady bugs into the high school seemed like a really good Senior prank" he goes on later to state that the lesson learned was that you can outrun a cop, but that you can't outrun a Motorola.
Works Cited
Martens, Carl. It Sounded Good at the Time. Atlanta, GA: Richterkessing, Inc. 2007
Motorola. 1994-2007. <http://www.motorola.com/> (note...I'm no English major so this could very well be cited wrong)
This isn't the greatest example...I've never written a book, but if I did that would be it's title...do you see the point I'm trying to make? My generation invented hyperlinking so we wouldn't have to have works cited pages on every published article/website on the internet! Hooray to Generation X...boo to Associated Press.
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