AP brings the hammer down on bloggers, wants $12.50 for a 5-word quote &mdash and puts out call for snitches

I'll demonstrate a little "fair use" myself by quoting from the NY Times article (we are a member of the NY Times News Service, so this isn't such a leap in any case):

Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was "heavy-handed" and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.

The Drudge Retort was initially started as a left-leaning parody of the much larger Drudge Report, run by the conservative muckraker Matt Drudge. In recent years, the Drudge Retort has become more of a social news site, similar to sites like Digg, in which members post links to news articles for others to comment on.

I'll acknowledge at one level that the AP can decide what it wants to do with its copy, but charging for a 12-word quote? That's pretty crazy. What the AP needs to do is monetize its content in the same way as every other damn entity on the Web. Or they can pull out of the Web entirely and keep their content solely for print. Well, that cat is all the way out of the bag, right?

If you're going to read anything, do read the New York Times article. See? I'm linking to the story in its original form, which is all anybody wants. Part of the social contract, as it were, among bloggers and other Web publishing types is giving credit where it's due and providing the resources to go to the original source of that very content.

I did no less in the pre-Web days (for newspapers, anyway) when I worked at L.A.'s City News Service in the '90s. We used to source damn nearly everything, giving subscribers to the wire service all the phone numbers and other information they needed to take the story wherever they wanted to go with it. As both an editor at CNS and before that at the small papers that occasionally fed the wire with local copy, I can attest that CNS was always better than AP in giving credit to the little guy who came up with the story in the first place.

I'm not meaning to slag AP. OK, I am, but I think the whole point here is that whatever AP wants to do, it needs to get its s--- together, convene with its members, legal idiots and whoever else they feel the need to bring into the conversation, and come up with a policy that's reasonable, fair and non-draconian. Beats what they're doing now, right?