AP: “We're Done” Answering Questions About Fair Use & Our Rights System
Still confused about the Associated Press's announcement last week about a new content tagging system that's supposed to provide rights information? I am — but the AP's apparently not talking to anyone further about it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop the AP opened in June 2008, when it told the New York Times it would set guidelines for blogs quoting its articles — a move prompted by the Drudge Retort takedown dispute, whose 'resolution' explicitly left the underlying fair-use questions unresolved. A year later the wire service is answering those questions not with policy but with plumbing: a content tagging system, confirmed as announced last week, intended to carry rights information inside the content itself.
Why it matters now: the AP enters this conversation weakened. Jeff Jarvis's argument for replacing the AP altogether ran on BuzzMachine just four days before this report, so every opaque move on rights costs the cooperative goodwill it can ill afford. And the wire's own claim that it will keep answering questions about the system is contested — Daggle's reporting frames the organization as having shut down the discussion entirely.
First-order effects
- Member papers and bloggers who quote AP copy must now interpret the meaning of the new rights tags themselves — there is no documented licensing tier or permitted-use scale behind them, only the June 2008 promise of guidelines.
Second-order effects
- Every unanswered question strengthens the substitution argument already circulating: if the AP won't explain its terms, publishers weighing the case for replacing the AP have one more reason to price alternatives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, wire-service reuse policy migrates from negotiated, publicly argued rules into machine-readable metadata whose semantics the rights-holder alone defines — pushing courts, rather than press associations, to become the arbiter of what counts as fair use.
The trend: News agencies are shifting rights enforcement from published licensing rules to embedded technical metadata, with policy communicated by announcement rather than answered questions.