AP is watching you
The commercial model for most media is to build up an audience for its content, which is accessed either for free or on a subscription basis, and then charge for advertisements to be placed alongside that content.
Online, a key way of building and maintaining that audience is by having your content linked to by other sites or by news aggregators like Google. It has become common practice for online media to publish news stories derived from other sites and attribute them as the original source.
In principle, the original source of the content is more than compensated for the third party use of its material by the additional traffic generated by the attribution.
Giant news cooperative Associated Press (AP) seems to see things differently, however. Earlier this week it issued a press release partly entitled "AP Board announces initiative to protect industry‘s content," announcing the launch of "an industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online."
It seems that AP, which describes itself as a 'not-for-profit cooperative', wants online media to either license its content or not use any part of it at all. Furthermore it has threatened legal action against those who don't properly license its content.
"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," said AP chairman Dean Singleton. In order to enforce this stance, AP is developing an online tracking system to identify such miscreants, presumably in order to be able to take legal action against them.