So the AP still doesn’t “get” fair use. Or they don’t want to get it. According to Tom Curley, AP’s chief executive:
The company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. … He specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.
So, AP seriously wants everyone to pay for the privilege of linking back to their own articles. So what’s the logical outcome a) a brand new revenue stream b) a serious downturn in traffic back to their sites, and a corresponding decrease in ad revenue?
And then we have Steven Metalitz, lawyer for the RIAA and MPAA (Now that’s a satanic resume) who has no real problem with the planned obsolescence of DRM’d content. Just cause you bought it don’t mean you get to keep it. That attitude doesn’t promote piracy at all, does it?
Then we have the hysterical antics of the Canadian Access Copyright society, that would make anyone ashamed to be a copyright holder. (But then, none of this is about protecting individual authors, is it?)