There's previously been talk about how the Associated Press doesn't want you to quote long extracts from their articles. In the AP's case, long is not long indeed.
I just wrote a post in Empoprise-IE that relied upon an AP article, so I very carefully quoted from said article:
...$65,000....$10,000...$2,000...
And even with that, I almost exceeded AP's quoting requirements...well, AP's quoting requirements for free use. While I was on vacation, Mashable spilled the gory details:
Part of the AP’s plan is to charge for use of its articles if you quote 5 words or more. They signed a deal with iCopyright in April last year to accomplish this goal. iCopyright is a widget that handles not only print and email, but republishing as well. Well the widget’s starting to get some attention, if only for the jaw-dropping starting price the AP is charging for quoting its stories: $2.50 per word.
The process goes like this: you copy and paste the excerpt or article you want to reprint. Next you pick your price, ranging from $12.50 for five words to $100 for 251 words or more.
Now because I run ads on Empoprise-IE, I assume that I would be considered a commercial entity. And I can say with authority that my revenue from any one blog post does not exceed $12.50.
So if you wonder why Associated Press articles are rarely featured on my blog, this is why. And I agree with Mashable that this may hurt the AP in the long term:
[T]he entire policy is a battle against the direction of progress, and the price point is way off. Social media helps spread information faster and to more people, which is the point of a wired service like the AP. The company’s complaint is that blogs and news aggregators (i.e. Google News) are taking its content and making all the advertising revenue. What they forget is that they provide a great deal of traffic and attention to content creators in the process.
Now I should give the Associated Press equal time. After the Mashable post ran, the AP issued the following statement:
The iCopyright form that
(Whew, that was close!)
