Oh those jokesters over at the AP — the fun never ends! Last night, we wrote a post noting that Woot was (humorously) calling out the AP for not following their own ridiculous rules when quoting from content. By Woot’s calculation, using the AP tool, the AP owes them $17.50 (but Woot was nice enough to offer them the chance to buy some headphones off of Woot instead). The AP didn’t like that… → Read More
Gotta love those guys at Woot. They just sold to Amazon for $110 million, but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage.
You see, Woot noticed that the AP covered the story of their sale five days ago. But in doing so, they also noticed… → Read More
Online news aggregation and curation startup Publish2 is today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference launching a new product dubbed Publish2 News Exchange, with the ambitious goal of disrupting the entire reason for being of The Associated Press.
The AP being the cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and TV stations in the US, which operates a monster news and photo distribution… → Read More
Live video streaming on the Web is finally going mainstream. Livestream, the NYC-based live video streaming startup, just landed a one-year partnership with the Associated Press to power all of the AP’s live video streams on the Web. The first event to be streamed live under the new deal will be video from the red carpet at the Oscars this Sunday.
The video will be hosted by Livestream at … → Read More
Oh the Associated Press, our most favorite banned news source. It seems almost monthly they do something that defies logic and/or looks to be a suicidal act. And today brings another oddity.
The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve… → Read More
Through much of last year, the Associated Press threw public barbs and veiled threats at Google, while in private it was renegotiating its licensing agreement with Google News. That agreement is believed to be up for renewal at the end of this month, yet no new AP stories have appeared directly on Google News since December 23, 2009. (AP stories licensed by other news sites such as ABC News or… → Read More
Are you still confused about the latest twists in the AP’s copyright infringement case against artist Shepard Fairey for his use of an AP photograph as the inspiration for his famous Obama Hope poster? Just watch this Attack of the Show video in which TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid explains how Fairey was caught lying about which image he used (a story Jason broke on Friday, even beating the AP), but… → Read More
We reached out to Shepard Fairey about the AP’s release this evening claiming that he had admitted lying about which image he used as the source image for his iconic Hope poster. He sent us a response (reproduced below), which effectively confirms what the AP says.
Tonight’s admission focuses on the photo that Fairey originally claimed to use during his creation of the ‘Hope’ poster — he… → Read More
The AP has just released a statement declaring that Shepard Fairey, the artist being accused of copyright infringement for his iconic ‘Hope’ poster that became ubiquitous during the Obama campaign, has “admitted to the AP that he fabricated and attempted to destroy other evidence in an effort to bolster his fair use case and cover up his previous lies and omissions.”.
According to the statement… → Read More
My post yesterday about the Associated Press going after one of its own affiliates for embedding videos from the A.P.’s own YouTube channel on its Website caused a bit of a dust-up. As I noted in an update to the original post, the A.P. is now backing down and apologizing. It will allow the videos to go up again.
The A.P. also sent me a statement saying no cease-and-desist letter was ever… → Read More
(Updated) Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter warning from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from… → Read More
The newspaper industry is making a lot of noise these days about the Web “stealing” its content and destroying its business. Invariably, the newsmen point their ink-stained fingers at blogs, which are nothing more than “parasites”, or at Google, which is supposedly aiding and abetting in the wholesale theft of the newspaper’s precious words. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and… → Read More
With its news syndication business under direct attack by the growing abundance of other news sources on the Internet, the Associated Press announced today that it will begin to police the Web and “develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.” The A.P., it appears, wants to become the RIAA of the flailing newspaper industry—ferreting out… → Read More
The Associated Press is on the wrong of a fair use argument again. It is actually suing artist Shepard Fairey for his iconic Obama poster, which it recently discovered was based on an AP news photograph by Mannie Garcia. The poster is clearly based on that photograph (see comparison at left), but this is exactly the kind of use of copyrighted works that is meant to be protected.
The poster is… → Read More
Far be it for the simple gadget bloggers here at CrunchGear.com to comment on legal issues concerning fair use and quoting other news sources, but if you’ve been following the Associated Press brouhaha over the past week or so, you’ll know that plenty of people are pretty riled up. If you haven’t been following the debate, the short version is that the Associated Press now wants to charge… → Read More
As far as I can tell, the Associated Press is sticking by its ridiculous and unlawful assertion that “direct quotations, even short ones” are copyright infringements and result in lawsuit threats and DMCA takedown notices. This story led us to ban the A.P., call the New York Times out on undisclosed conflicts of interest and begin to investigate some ridiculous organization called the… → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunchuk%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F1011842%3Freferrer%3Dblip%2Etv%26source%3D1&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf The controversy over the Associated Press trying to create its own rules about bloggers quoting from its… → Read More
The stories over the weekend were bad enough – the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions. Drudge Retort is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they… → Read More
It’s like a newspaper in your phone. I like the idea of location-targeted news from the Associated Press coming straight to my iPhone (and probably iPod Touch); it’s like the local page from your newspaper, but without the cow-tipping updates. A lot of the big news corporations are on board, which means you won’t be getting locked out of good local content. There will, of course… → Read More
The Associated Press Online Video Network (OVN), a joint project between the AP and Microsoft, has implemented a new syndicated video feature that will allow AP affiliates around the world to easily share content with each other’s websites. Members are able to selectively choose which affiliates will be allowed to use their media, and receive a portion of the revenue earned on these remote… → Read More
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