Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used. […]
Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use.
Linking is at the very heart of the web—in many ways, it is the web. That the Associated Press and newspapers, without which the AP would be much diminished, do not understand even this simplest of web truisms is regrettable but understandable.
The AP will lose this battle, as any organization that attempts such restrictions will lose and, in turn, only hurt itself. But sadly—and I say that earnestly, as one who still very much loves newspapers—the people with the power to save newspapers are those who have no incentives to change them.
And so we read reports of reduced expectations, margins and costs within, at their cores, unchanged organizations. But without a change, the news organizations of yore have not long to live. The traditional business model just doesn’t work anymore, and forcing it on the web isn’t going to work any better.
The choice, then, is natural selection at its simplest: Evolve or die.