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After DRM failed in music and film, after the New York Times abandoned its paywall, with one DRM fiasco after another, The Financial Times headline says, AP lays groundwork for content protection, and says,

The Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news wires, took a decisive step to protect its content on Thursday by approving construction of a system that will tag and track all its content across the internet.

The content registry system is a first step in a strategy announced in April to stop text, pictures and videos from proliferating across the internet without permission or pay.

Here's the most interesting paragraph in the story:

Bloggers and news aggregators are likely to be enraged. At present they do not pay to use extracts of news agencies’ content. They believe they are within their rights under “fair use” laws that also permit limited use of copyrighted material without consent for artists and the news media.

A belief. Like the tooth fairy. When will these bloggers grow up?

The story continues:

AP, which is owned by a consortium of 1,500 US newspapers, will begin testing the registry by November and offer a service to member publishers by the first half of next year.

AP has invested $55m to develop the core technologies and will spend a further $10m on other projects.

AP's own Web site for this project says:

The Associated Press . . .spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and sharing news of public interest from around the world. Licensing of this content by our members is critical to support our news operations. In the new digital content economy, however, a significant amount of AP news and news from AP members is used without permission or fair compensation. This situation has serious consequences: it dilutes the value of news for licensors and advertisers; it fragments and disperses content so widely that consumers end up relying on fragmented coverage to get their news despite the availability of comprehensive and authoritative coverage on a 24-hour basis.

I wish AP all the best on its endeavor to keep its news from being used. It's too bad its consumers customers have eyeballs, brains, fingers, and the public, unfiltered Internet.

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