Ooh ... shiny.

The problem with “Freedom of Press” is that it doesn’t make any sense to give a freedom to a particular vocation—and yet that appears to be what the Associated Press seems to think that freedom of press means. In fact, it could be better translated as “freedom of non-libelous, non-slanderous information sharing.” If a member of the traditional press publishes an article, that member reserves some sense of copyright over the article as a whole. It shouldn’t be reprinted as a whole or even in part without attribution. But as soon as the AP says that people have to pay for a “quote license,” they’re just dancing all over the law’s grave. It mocks academic study. Hell, it mocks journalism.

AP to meet with blogging group to form guidelines: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

That’s a nice article about how the AP is doing us all the favor of meeting with some sort of bloggers’ group “to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.” It features a quote from Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, noting that if the guidelines help the AP to formulate its take-down complaints to quoting bloggers so that the complaints more closely match the law, then the process might be a good thing. If, on the other hand, the AP says that bloggers can buy licenses to quote 5-25 words of an article—that is, an amount which should decidedly fall under the auspices of “fair use” if propery attributed, etc., as defined by the law—then “that wouldn’t be helpful,” Seltzer says.

That’s very diplomatic of Ms. Seltzer, but I’m not buying diplomacy here. If a group like the AP—even though it may be a non-profit cooperative—tries to bully people into paying for something that is legally fair for them to use, then the issue goes further than simply invoking the law and saying “Ha ha! I don’t have to pay for this after all!” There needs to be some sort of restriction against the AP’s being able to charge people, essentially, for the equivalent of a high schooler’s elevator pass—you can pay for it, but it’s not going to get you anywhere.

Further comment may be found by Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light here and here, as well as by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing here.

Doctorow makes the point, as well, that the “fine print” says the AP can revoke your license if it doesn’t like the way in which you use the quote.

As a former newspaper journalist, I’m just imagining what would’ve happened if the people I had to interview charged us, the press, every time we wanted to quote them. And if they could take away our right to quote others when they didn’t like what we printed? Crumbs!

My final thought, at least for the moment, is that the traditional press would be up in arms if the major bloggers banded together as a group and issued quote licenses. Yes, there was a day when anyone could write whatever he wanted on the Internet, but the passage of time has brought about a series of checks and balances. I think we’re just as likely to find truth in most blogs as we are to find it in most traditional news these days. This is probably not the case if you’re reading the MySpace page of someone named G0551pG1rL, for instance, but if you read a story online that sounds unbelievable, check the comments. As Launcelot says, truth will out.

I hope that this turns out to be merely an interesting story, and not a scary one.

Edited to add: John Scalzi’s clever retort

I’m pretty good at trimming back comments in which a commenter has quoted too much of an article, or song lyrics, or whatever. Because I’m pretty strongly of the belief that fair use shouldn’t be abused, and that educating people on what is fair use is a good way to keep it strong and useful in our society.

Also: Ongoing coverage at UnassociatedPress.net