As the fight around Bill C-61 and unfaircopyright reform continues in Canada, the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that will allow writers, bloggers, etc to use quotes from their articles...
In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" -- the right to copy without permission -- means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").(h/t Making Light via Boing Boing)
It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP "reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
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4 comments:
If boing-boing were part of the Associated Press, you'd owe them $50.00.
Very odd thought, could the AP being doing this, in this manner, at this time, as a way of sending up the new copyright legislation?
Personally, I've taken to adding the following to my messages:
EULA: The preceding message has been encoded with double ROT-13 encryption. Decrypting and reading this message signifies your agreement to this EULA whereby the reader agrees to purchase the author a steak dinner upon their next meeting. If the reader no longer agrees with the terms of this EULA they may receive a full refund by writing the author, in Farsi, and explaining why they should not be compelled to comply with a license they didn't know was present before they started.
The beauty is, under C-61, it has the force of law.
bollocks. the free press controlling free speech.
So how much should that quote have cost? And more importantly, how much are you going to pay so we don't report you ;-)
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