There has been some talk about the Associated Press’ new system, called hNews for some reason, for protecting its precious copywritten materials from bloggers, pirates and pederasts. The system will include a DRM system that will make sure you can’t cut and paste data from a browser to a blog post, thereby ensuring that no one can steal the AP’s valuable, value-added content. As I recall similar systems were implemented by websites back in the days of AOL. They didn’t work because you could just view the source code or, interestingly enough, take a screen shot.
The system works by putting something into a digital container and then sending to Google or whatever. This same system, as you recall, has prevented the rise of piracy in the music and movie arenas and must be applied to the written word before the Internet fails and we all resort to getting our news from “prophets” who will line major thoroughfares opining on things they believe happened, whether or not they are true. In short, we’ll be stuck with cable news pundits.
Here’s the real graphic. It makes as much sense as the one above:
Seriously: the AP knows it’s in a losing race. I completely understand the value of what they produce. They have been a source of strong reporting for decades. But their vehicle – paying newspapers – is gone. This new vehicle, however, could keep them afloat if they stopped treating the Internet like the Wild West.
What the AP is essentially trying to stamp out are splogs. These blogs steal an RSS feed, post the stories as their own, and put up AdSense blocks to score tens of cents per month on impressions. It’s like a general turning his Sherman tank towards a pine tree that is in his army’s way. There are better methods to prevent wholesale theft and most include creating content so compelling that news sources want to pay you to publish them. For example, if the AP told us we could pay 50 cents to repost a good, topical AP story on CrunchGear, I’d jump at the opportunity. I won’t, however, accept a wonky, half-assed DRM solution.
Im gonna DRM my refrigerator.
You can, but I have already DRM’d the freezer. So call me if you want to work a mash-up.
HAHAHAHA…FAIL.
AP IS A JOKE.
EVER HEARD OF SCREENSCRAPING?
http://www.ishatmypants.com
Ever heard that capslock toggles on and off?
Time to play the Chopin Funeral March: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgw_RD_1_5I
The AP and I have chosen to live in the top graphic, the one with the Unicorns.
Thank you.
What a joke!! Why dont they learn from the mistakes of the music industry?
And why doesn’t that woman in the nice dress learn from that rape victim last week? Go ahead, blame the victim.
The real question here isn’t whether it’s fair that the AP be driven out of business–that’s likely going to happen regardless of what they do next. The question is also *not* whether their DRM scheme will work or not. It won’t. You can’t give someone the content without giving them the content. The real issue at hand is that the executives at the AP screwed up big time by ignoring the changing environment around them and then, instead of accepting responsibility and attempting to adjust their model and tactics, resorting to “blame the pirates” technique made famous by the recording industry (this is where the analogy comes in).
Summary: The AP execs screwed up. They refused to admit it to their board, however, and instead began pointing fingers at whatever “culprit” was handy. Then they had to back up their accusations by attacking the straw man they had set up and at least appear to be beating the heck out of him to satisfy the powers that be.
Economic theory of the day: The AP almost certainly produces content that is superior to most non-professional content. The consumer, however, is faced with this choice: pay $X for the superior content or pay $0 for alternative content that is probably 80% as good. The AP is facing a classic low-end disruptor, not an army of headline pirates. Whether it’s fair or not is irrelevant–the AP will either change its business model or cease to exist.
if the paid content is locked to one place/way to view & the pirated content is identical except for missing that bit then i think the original content is probably about 80% as good as the pirated stuff, right?
they don’t understand that the music industry made mistakes. Who manages these companies anyway and who are their management consultants? i suggest they hire proven talent!
Wow… the thumbnail image sure doesn’t do your version of the fucking graphic justice at all. I am gonna print that bullshit and put it on my fucking wall. Nice fucking job!
This is racist !!!
it is?
Don’t ask me. I learned this in Diversity Training back in April. They taught us to allege racism when we have nothing useful to say. When in doubt, pull the race card. You can never be too careful.
gotcha, but i found your comment to be racist
LOL. You are a natural. I will submit your name to the Diversity Cadre Recruiter.
wat
That’s probably one of the best graphics.
agreed! it is my fave thus far. :)
This is not going to work correctly look what happen with the music industry and computer companies. it will come back and bit them in the butt later
Can someone please make a similar graphic for the RIAA? We need a matching set.
Very good graphic and much more effective at communicating the gist. I’d subscribe to your news feed over AP’s anytime. Oh wait, I already did. Game point, match, AP. TC/CG wins.
I know this will get me banished to the third circle of blogger hell, but there is a real problem here. All you bloggers proudly state that you are just bloggers, so shouldn’t be expected to live up to the journalistic standards of a newspaper reporter, and yet no one is buying newspapers.
So, if there is no way for organizations like AP to monetize their content, then who is going to put up the money for the expensive work of someone doing the real reporting? Not every story can be thoroughly covered by some blogger giving his personal opinion on the contents of a press release, after all.
It is really easy to claim that without DRM, you would happily pay for a service, if it were just compelling enough. However the history of the internet thus far has been no matter how far content providers bend over to make their products “compelling enough” people still find an infinite number of excuses to pirate the content. It isn’t, for example, as though all those people who swore they would never pirate another song again, if labels just got rid of DRM and provided online per-song purchasing, actually stopped pirating when the labels removed the DRM. They just moved on to complaining about how the music wasn’t WORTH paying for, and for the most part kept pirating all the content they wanted.
My cat’s breath smells like cat food.
I love the AP. I know they do good work. As I said, if they had a system to monetize their work I’d syndicate the heck out of them, just as larger sites do.
Give me a feed that I can purchase from and I’ll send them micropayment after micropayment. I’m sure Michael would even spring for a subscription. However, if joeslittlefunblog.blogspot.com could pay 50 cents for posting rights to a full article, I think he would pay it. It’s a value add for the blog and it makes AP some money.
Don’t tell me; you work for the AP. Seriously, you have no clue whats going on if you really think bloggers don’t do original reporting. The worst part of this assumption is that many journalists now blog – so where do they fall?
Also with DRM, John’s point is not that he doesn’t like DRM; it’s that it has FAILED to work. It doesn’t stop pirates and screws legitimate customers. Basing your business model off a failed method just shows how clueless the AP is.
Creating original content, and doing in-depth reporting, are not the same thing. How many websites have a Baghdad, Islamabad or Johannesburg bureau? I notice every tech blog on the planet was talking about working conditions in China last week, how many of them have dispatched bloggers to Shenzhen to find out the true state of working conditions?
Oh, wait, that’s right, they all just sat in their apartment, or at best office, writing up a story based on second-hand and third-hand accounts of other people’s investigative reporting, and then telling us their opinion of what they thought those stories might mean.
Sure, there are plenty of blogs that will sit down and interview someone from a company’s PR department, or chat with someone selling a book, or review a product that was sent to them, but I can think of only one or two examples of a web-only news source going to ground and doing real reporting, rather than editorializing facts presented to them by someone else.
And no, I have never worked for any news organization of any kind. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the importance of what they do.
Honest question here.. does the AP ever reciprocate these morals? For example.. when they cite or print blogs or stories about a blog or any online resources like social networking sites and Twitter, do they ever pay the original content’s provider?
I don’t think I’ve heard of them doing touting the same message when they’re the one picking up someone else’s content out on the Internet.
At least we know the AP reads the blogs. That’s one step in the right direction.
I applaud the AP for trying. I know that bloggers occasionally commit real journalism just like professional journalists do every once and a bit. But I think we need to find a better way to channel money back to the risk takers. This may not be it, but I really hate the low-grade slime buckets on this page who want to mock someone trying to make a relatively honest buck. These are union-backed jobs with real pensions and health insurance that are disappearing.
Once this scheme goes live, the time to the first Greasemonkey script that neutralizes it can be measured in minutes.
“…protecting its precious copywritten materials …” “Copyright” means “the right to copy.” If something has a copyright, it is “copyrighted.”
i was being facetious
already hacked, bank on it
good but they should also consider the mistakes of music industry
Wow…that fucking graph IS going fucking upwards. Except…it’s actually going downwards. It peaks at Nano Green. Down a bit on Reb Bull Red. Back up a week later on Fox News Blue. Then back down as Nano Green hits again. The crooked arrow is misleading, but the charts are clear. DRM is fucking going fucking downwards.
These diagrams are all the rage now. Here’s one the BBC made earlier:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/img/hdrights.jpg
Translation from AP to English:
Container: microformat wrapper HTML that gets embedded into the AP wire story.
Tracking beacon: 1×1 transparent .gif
Protection/enforcement: Spider the web, look for copies of the story. Send DMCA notices to Google to turn off ads.
Thanks. That was easier than trying to decipher the article.
All I can say is lol………all that gibberish and flash, for what they are doing allready!
Hahaha! That’s fucking brilliant!
Om my god. That is by far the best graphic and representation of that digital cancer (DRM) I’ve ever seen. Keep up the good work guys!
“There are better methods to prevent wholesale theft and most include creating content so compelling that news sources want to pay you to publish them.”
Ok, I see. So the theft is happening, not because its easy to do, but because content isn’t “compelling” enough. This assertion is just as childish and fallacious as claiming that P2P music sharing was a reaction to the sorry state of music in the late 90s, and not the result of the proliferation of the internet and breakthroughs in sound-encoding techniques. People could do it, so they did.
Let’s see what happens if I set up a blog called TechMunch, and proceed to copy every article and scoop posted by TechCrunch’s bloggers. And while I’m at it, 10 of my buddies are going to set up identical blogs and and make us some AdSense scrilla. How long would it take Arrington et al. to crap bricks and send me threatening, lawyer-type letters?
“This new vehicle, however, could keep them afloat of they stopped treating the Internet like the wild west.”
At least the AP proofreads.
Best Comment Yet. I am with you. Unfortunately Techmunch.com is already taken.
Are you new to the Internet?
People do that *NOW*.
Do a Google search for a random sentence in a popular TechCrunch post and a million spam blogs pop up.
hehe, so will the DRM consist of converting text to images (or worse.. a flash movie that “plays” as you scroll down?)
하지만 OCR 가 출동하면 어떨까?
wth? You must be from North Korea.
I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time (I scared the drone in the next cubicle over). That diagram is epic.
50 cents a pop per story w/ topical content, eh? How generous. And how many people would then be reading the story on your site? Let’s say 10,000 – though I’m sure it’s much more. Can you split 50 cents 10,000 ways? Are you f’ing kidding me?
If a particular story cost say, $2000.00, to cover – (think the reporter’s salary, the editor’s salary, technical infrastructure to disseminate the story – on top of the actual expenses laid out while covering the story) the AP would only need 4,000 bloggers to cough up their two quarters. Does that sound like a plausible business model to you? I don’t think so.
I think the AP, and every other original content producer out there, should be doing whatever they can, including the DRM efforts to protect the content they pay significant amounts of money to produce, in order to remain viable.
Best. Photo. Ever. Although every word has me laughing, one word took it over the top, unicorns.
Try http://www.reuters.com.
How do they do it?
Don’t know don’t care don’t need ap.
Reuters does a lot of it one a time-sensitivity basis. Sells news first to people who subscribe… then releases it. Also does a ton of research and proprietary reporting.
Just brilliant
This is the next best thing to the CUE:CAT .
Man these news guys are down right geniuses.
Wasn’t the CUE:CAT what signaled the official end of the dotcom? Maybe this DRM text will signal the official end of the newspaper or at least the AP.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/CueCat-upside.jpg
Here Here, AP:
document.oncontextmenu= function() { return false; }
This code is safer than your shitty DRM system. Can I have the $$$ now?
It upsets me when individuals and organizations that make an effort to protect their intellectual property are subjected to wholesale mockery. “Information wants to be free,” as we have all been endlessly told. But high quality content–such as investigative reporting, professionally recorded and produced music, and blockbuster movies–do not want to be free, because they require a tremendous expense to produce.
It’s a bit harsh to paint the AP as a counter-revolutionary luddite to try to preserve it’s revenue. Sure, its DRM might not be the answer. But to suggest a business model that could never begin to recoup its expenses as an alternative is at least as naive. It was in these very pages that the Wall Street Journal was maligned for its micro-payment scheme because it by protecting its content, it didn’t allow links to be passed, and thus was equally oblivious to the laws of how the internet does and will work.
The internet wants things to be free because it makes information cheap to distribute, and because people like to get stuff for free, particularly if they don’t feel as if other people are watching and judging them because they get something free that they would have had to pay for elsewhere. It makes things free because it disassociates the consumers of content from the producers of content.
I honestly believe that if the people who wanted quality content for free understood that there were other people who didn’t want it to be free, not because they were idiots or luddites, but because they put resources into creating it, there wouldn’t be this rush to judge anyone trying to protect something they spent their talent, energy, or resources to create it. And the great pity is that internet has made it easier for us to ignore that.
I agree. I wish we could pay for great content with some ads, but that doesn’t seem to be working. Expensive content can’t compete with easy toss-away content like someone’s Facebook status update. Advertisers could care less whether their ads are next to a Facebook page or an AP story. So in the long run, the AP can only put in as much work per word as the person tossing off a Facebook update.
Have to agree with Jasper and Lee Lloyd. Especially that the majority of blogs simply editorialize. If all the source content was taken down for a day they’d probably have nothing to blog about.
What’s the problem with AP trying to monetize their product? I don’t get it.
There is nothing wrong with the AP trying to monetize their product.
However:
1) Their product sucks and no one is willing to pay for it.
2) Everyone hates DRM
3) There are plenty of other alternatives when it comes to generic AP-style news content, and all of it is free.
4) None of this magical container, beacon, unicorn stuff will actually work.
If the A.P. wants to monetize their content, they could start by producing much higher quality, truly differentiated content that people want to read and would be willing to pay for. Otherwise they should find other business models that don’t depend on them producing quality content. Get out of the content business. Blacksmiths used to be an integral part of society, but they no longer exist.
Thank you! Finally, someone else that brings up the example of the blacksmith. If you have a business method that has been replaced with something more efficient or reliable that antiquates your business method, maybe it’s finally time to realize it and modernize or move on.
I could be wrong, but I think the problem is that AP is going beyond simply monetizing their product and is instead extending their Constitutionally provided “limited monopoly” beyond copyright and into similarly granted fair use rights and First Amendment rights for freedom of speech. The problem seems to be that they’re not flipping out over wholly copied material. I believe that they’re flipping out over headlines and short summaries (typical RSS feed material) that point out that the AP has these stories and over people who cite their stories as part of their blogs for the sake of discussion. I don’t see how the RSS feed propogation hurts their business when the whole point is that if you want to read about a story, you click the link to go to the AP article itself. As for the citations, how do you have a proper and informed discussion without being able to cite the material you’re discussing? Particularly if access to that material is being limited? This is the whole POINT of first amendment rights to free speech–so that copyright doesn’t trump the ability for people to expose information and discuss it openly and freely.
Speaking of originating content, who came up with the image in the article? I saw it at http://kiyoshimartinez.tumblr.com/post/149732073/alwayscapitalize-emptyage-ap-internet-plan first.
AP product “sucks?” And they need to produce “higher quality, differentiated content”?
What a bunch of boilerplate nonsense. Sure, everyone hates DRM, and few consumers want to pay for much of anything online.
The AP is a news organization, one that would be difficult if not impossible to replace. Blogs won’t do it, nor will “citizen journalism.” What they do IS expensive, and it certainly has value. The blacksmith (or buggy whip) analogy is ludicrous, unless an informed public is now somehow archaic.
Best graphic. Ever.
For all those defending AP or the BIG 5 recording labels, you’re wasting your time.
This is about “disruption” of Goliath who tromped on the little guy until he or she bled to death.
Once the greedy bastard is dead, we start over.
It has nothing to do with legality.
It’s all about fair play.
If faceless corporations hadn’t disrespected artists, writers, and creatives in general, they wouldn’t be defending their share prices.
The news media industry brought anarchy upon themselves.
If only it were that simple, Maurice.
Ummm… The AP Goliath tromped on the little guy by providing him with news and information he never could have learned for himself, and bled him to death by not charging him a penny for this service?
The faceless AP corporation disrespected writers by hiring more of them than any other news organization on Earth, and disrespected artists and creatives in general by publishing more stories on them than any other news organization on Earth?
AP are greedy bastards for lowering the cost of news gathering by pooling resources and contracting freelancers to sell content to new organizations so they don’t have to maintain their own individual bureaus?
?????
When, exactly, has AP ever done anything but provide the news faster and more comprehensively than just about any other news service? Has the AP ever even asked you personally to pay for all this great coverage? What, specifically, do you find so greedy oppressive and unfair about the AP’s business model of asking to be paid by people republishing their stories?
Oh right, I’m wasting my time, because this is about “disruption.” It isn’t about a rational assessment of the value of a service, it is about some puerile, post-rational idea of sticking it to those stuffed-shirt fat-cats in the “old media.”
Umm, i think Maurice was talking about the look-but-don’t-touch approach they have to the content. Disrespecting people who want to further discuss the story in their own context – you don’t stamp on the casual everyday users … but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that this isn’t about the value of a service or even *if it should survive* it’s about if it *can* survive – You may have a right to live at the bottom of a volcano (there are even some advantages) but if it erupts then you *move*! ;-)
I hope this doesn’t mean people stop using the AP’s style guide too. I’d hate to be relegated to the John Biggs Manual of Style.
Why not try the Wall Street Journal business model? Pay to read the latest complete news but as the news article becomes older and less relevant it becomes free. Here’s their website: http://www.wsj.com
errr….. wut?
oh, good god haven’t we learned our lessons from DRM?! DRM = FAIL! and i can’t believe the AP is kicking it into gear.
hey, for shits and giggle though this is a great breakdown of how all this would ‘work’ for them.