AP: Wankers Of The Year

It's only February: but this qualifies:

On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year's presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

This is just a failing media company trying to capitalize off of someone else's art. When you are an artist who cannot get a public figure to come in for a sitting, you can appropriate images under the concept of fair use. The AP does not have a copyright on Barack Obama's image, and that's what Fairey used.

Wankers.

Allow Me To Repost Every AP Article One By One

Kos is spot-on. The AP is trying to create a brand-new standard, giving out "licenses" for bloggers to excerpt their content, when the guidelines of fair use are still completely operative in copyright law. And this is an interesting way of attacking it:

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I'm going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I've got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP -- an organization famous for taking its members work without credit -- will either back down and shut the hell up, or we'll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn't get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they'll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

I probably can't afford it so I'm going to stick with the boycott, but the least Kos should do is to link and thereafter tell everyone not to click on the link. And part of me is tempted to quote four paragraphs of every story the AP write for a full day.

This is an open and shut case. The AP wants to build walls around their content that have no basis in law.

UPDATE: Read this. The AP's Terms of Use are insane.

It's A Big Internet And Everybody Wants A Piece

If the Associated Press thinks that restricting their content is going to result in a successful business model online, they might want to give The New York Times a call. They discontinued their protected content because they knew they were losing money in the long run. Information on the Web wants to be free, and you end up making more money for yourself and your member publishers by allowing the excessive linking of the blogosphere to raise your traffic. If you restrict that in any way you're just going to end up having bloggers like me stop linking to you entirely. And while I'm small potatoes, others aren't, and having the whole political Internet avoid the AP isn't going to do a lot for their bottom line.

Now this story is somewhat different. Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T are toying with charging customers through "Internet metering," making their highest-bandwidth users pay the freight, just as electricity customers pay for usage. That's not necessarily out of bounds, as long as some content (like that brandished by the service provider) isn't prioritized over others. But it is an old model of how ISPs have dealt with content, most similar to AOL's pay for service in the 1990s. That stagnated competition then and is sure to do so now.

The real importance of net neutrality is not so much to protect people from discrimination, but to create rational incentives for a better, more efficient Internet in the face of capacity constraints.

To back up, one benefit of capacity constraints (for now) is that they create demand for a solution. Indeed, the way we “solve” this problem will determine the future of the Internet.

For instance, in a world of access tiering, companies have less of an incentive to increase capacity – that’s because scarcity will have been built into the business model. For that reason, a world of access tiering will depress innovation and be less receptive to new, data-intensive applications/services. Thus, in this world, companies would solve the capacity problem by assuming more control and increasingly relying on bandwidth scarcity for revenue.

If, however, companies had to be content/application neutral, different solutions would necessarily emerge. Companies would be forced to build more capacity or to find better ways to compress data. There would also be greater demand for solutions from “the edge” – i.e., individual companies and entrepreneurs (e.g., BitTorrent) would have more incentives to create new data-compression techniques. And, frankly, I have more faith in the collective mind to develop these new services than say Comcast and AT&T.

Adding to this, I'd say that those companies who don't have the money to innovate would see less traffic because their service would be necessary costlier. And it would lead to the service provider delivering a lot of the video and high-bandwidth content in house. Furthermore, allowing charging for bandwidth is a slippery slope, and I simply don't trust the telecoms to take only one bite of the apple.

The sick thing is that there's plenty of money to be made off the Internet, by the AP or Time Warner or whoever, but it's greed that's driving these decisions.

I Could Get Mitt Romney In A Lot Of Trouble

This insane staged video of Mitt Romney and his family "decidering" to make the run for President really has to be seen to be believed. As TBogg writes it was just coincidental that the camera crew happened to be in Utah right at the same time that Mitt was figuring out whether or not to run for President, and captured that human drama of him and the family weigning this heavy decision. Mm-hm.

But there's something else about the video that caught my eye, mainly because I have so experience in the matter. What seems like a lifetime ago, I worked at NFL Films, which does all the highlight reels for the National Football League. The NFL is militant about licensing any of their video. One it crosses a 3-day "fair use" window, any scrap of footage from an NFL game, whether broadcast video or the film footage they shoot, must be licensed before aired anywhere. People tried to get around this all the time and use footage "without the express written consent of the National Football League." This got to be such a problem that they instituted a "Catch the Cheaters" program, where anyone on staff could call in and get a bonus for identifying a broadcaster using NFL footage without permission. The fine for such usage is $1,500 per SECOND of footage.

I don't know if the Romney campaign got consent, and I don't know how it works on the Internet, but there's at least 30 seconds of a Patriots game on in the background when Ann Romney is talking.

I don't have time to do this today (light posting throughout), but somebody should call 877-NFL-5675 and see it the Romney campaign got the rights to that NFL footage in the background of their campaign video. Let's try to blow $50,000 of Romney campaign money, shall we? I mean, some of that cash was raised by an alleged child abuser, so it shouldn't be hard for them to part with.