The Associated Press wants to charge you $12.50 to quote five words from them
The Associated Press, having already announced its intention to harass bloggers who publish snippets as short as 39 words from AP stories, has now published a web form through which intimidated parties can give …
Context & Ripple Effects
AP's same-day move to set rules for blog use of its articles established the policy backdrop; the published licensing form turns that stance into a stated price for even very short excerpts. The issue matters because bloggers and other online publishers routinely use brief quotations to identify and discuss reporting.
First-order effects
- Bloggers and site operators quoting AP material face a stated $12.50 licensing charge for a five-word excerpt, adding a rights-clearance decision to routine linking and commentary.
- AP gains a mechanism to present short online quotations as licensable uses rather than merely informal attribution.
Second-order effects
- Publishers that rely on short quoted excerpts may shift toward paraphrase, links without quotations, or reporting from other sources to avoid AP's stated fee.
- The policy puts AP's blog-use guidelines under practical scrutiny: the value of broad online citation is weighed against revenue from granular licensing.
Third-order effects
- If other news suppliers adopt similarly granular terms, online news discussion may become more dependent on links and summaries than verbatim excerpts.
- The episode points toward a more transactional model for newspaper content online, with copyright terms becoming part of distribution strategy rather than only a back-office concern.
The trend: News organizations are testing whether online circulation can be governed through explicit licensing terms for increasingly small units of content.