The A.P. Officially Goes Insane

The following plan is so full of fail I don’t even know where to begin.

Not only does it betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works, but how they think it’s a good idea to place a “wrapper” around their content so they can crack down on people who excerpt pieces of their content is beyond me. There are numerous ways people will be able to game that system since my guess is that “wrapper” is merely a keyword search in their system to identify sites that use their content.

Nonetheless, I bring you the freshest crazy of the day…

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

And here’s more on their “wrapper” technology…

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

Newspaper executives have said that by taking the lead, The A.P. ensures a unified approach, saves publishers from having to design their own software and circumvents possible charges of collusion against the papers.

Now let’s just say there really is an actual proprietary piece of technology The A.P. has developed to track their content. I don’t believe it, but let’s say it exists Even still, I predict that an hour after this system is launched, an 12 year old kid in Madison, Wisconsin figures out how to get around it.

Here’s the question: Is The A.P. literally this dumb?

(Photo: CS Monitor)