In a break with tradition, The Associated Press plans to prevent members and customers from publishing some AP content on their websites. Instead, those news organizations would link to the content on a central AP website — a move that could upend the consortium’s traditional notions of syndication.

That’s one revelation from a document we obtained (labeled “AP CONFIDENTIAL — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION”) that offers new insight into how the AP is planning to reinvent itself on the Internet.

The seven-page briefing, entitled “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online,” was distributed to AP members late last month. It provides greater detail about the tracking device that will be attached to AP content and describes their plans to create topic pages around news stories to rival Wikipedia and major aggregation sites. And in an hour-long interview last night, the AP’s general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, also shed light on how the consortium views reuse of its material across the Internet.

I’ll be wading through the document and what we’ve found in a series of posts beginning today. (You can subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter if you don’t want to miss anything.) We’ll eventually post the full document, too. And as we go, feel free to comment and ask questions so we can flesh this out. I think you’ll find this stuff applies to all news organizations, not just the 1,500 newspapers that own the AP.

“Utility” vs. “unique” news

There are several intertwined issues to address, but the first bit of news that caught my attention was this passage, which refers to a previously described program they’re calling “AP Protect, Point and Pay,” or AP3P:

The AP3P plan involves segmenting AP’s online products to broaden redistribution of what we call “utility” content, i.e., the type and amount of news that is quickly and easily available from other sources, to limit or prevent redistribution of the kinds of information AP provides uniquely to ensure that hypersyndication does not drive down its value, and to create a “news guide” in the form of landing pages to serve as a focal point for discovery of authoritative sources of news.

That distinction between utility and unique content immediately made me think of fair use. The AP’s position on copyright has recently been the subject of heated debate — get a flavor for it here — and this seemed like a new wrinkle in their thinking about the issue than hadn’t been previously voiced.

So was that a fair read of the passage? No, said Kasi, the AP’s general counsel, “it’s not to suggest that there’s a legal distinction.” (Though the AP has generally stopped granting interviews about their copyright stance and wouldn’t speak to me about it last month, Kasi got on the phone after I informed them we were writing about this document.) It’s less about law than search engine optimization and the link economy.

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Yesterday we revealed plans by The Associated Press to hold back some content from member websites. (Great discussion going on there, by the way.) The primary motivation of that initiative is search: AP material that resides on hundreds of disparate sites at the same time will hardly rate in Google compared to a single page with hundreds of links pointing to it. That’s a fundamental tenet of search engine optimization.

The same philosophy is driving their plan to build “news guide landing pages” that will aggregate the AP’s content around subjects, places, organizations, and people. Think of the topic pages on sites like The Chicago Tribune, BBC, and others — except that the AP will be harnessing its vast network of members and customers in what could amount to a brilliant SEO play.

The landing pages were first mentioned at the AP’s annual meeting in April, but further details haven’t emerged until now. In material distributed to some members last month, the news guide is described as “a central location to which headlines, promotional products and other content developed by AP could point.” What that will mean in practice is similar to what you find in the digital content of other news organizations: All references in AP articles to, say, Bill Clinton would link to the landing page with aggregated content and other material about the former president.

But, of course, those links to the landing pages would come from member news sites with excellent PageRank, the key metric used by Google to determine search results. (For instance, CNN, which carries AP content, has the maximum and extremely rare PageRank of 10.) It’s easy to see how the AP’s landing pages could, in short order, shoot up near the top of results for popular, news-related search terms.

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So what about THE BEACON?

When The Associated Press said last month that it was building a “news registry” of AP content, most reaction focused on the so-called “tracking beacon” that will monitor usage across the web. I use quotation marks because, well, those are metaphors for technology that’s still in development: The AP document we’ve obtained says the registry, set to launch on Nov. 15, will “require capabilities not currently available.”

But there’s nothing particularly magical about the beacon, which will amount to JavaScript embedded in the online feeds that are distributed to clients. So when you read an AP article on the New York Times website, a script running in the background will take note of that usage. (It’s unclear how news organizations like the Times, which is particularly neurotic about the weight of its pages, will feel about the script.)

Tracking readers

The point, of course, is to identify uses of AP and potentially member content that isn’t licensed. So if someone copied an article’s source code onto his own site, by hand or automation, the beacon would follow along and, according to the document distributed to some AP members, “send reports back to the core database each time the item is clicked on by an end user. The beacon will identify each piece of content, the IP address of the content viewer, the referring Web server and the time of use.”

I immediately flagged “IP address of the content viewer.” In recent years, the recording industry has used the IP addresses of downloaders to pursue legal action against people sharing music online, leading to lots of ill will toward the RIAA. That said, recording such data isn’t all that unusual. Websites using basic analytics software already record the IP addresses of their users.

When I asked the AP’s general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, about it, he said the AP wasn’t interested in monitoring who specifically reads their content on unauthorized sites: “In writing this” — he meant the document — “obviously, theoretically anything is possible. But what you actually make the final available piece is a different thing. This is simply: These are the capabilities that are possible.” Later, he added, “If at some point this business goes there, they’ll be completely transparent about it. There’ll be all the disclosure and compliance issues.”

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The Associated Press document we posted yesterday is in line with the consortium’s most bellicose rhetoric on copyright. It begins, “The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce, report and verify it.”

Because we obtained the document, the AP put me on the line with its general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, who spoke for an hour about various issues, including his office’s view of copyright, fair use, and the republication of AP material. Mostly, he tried to avoid any fine lines, but I still learned a lot, and you might be interested as well. This is obviously a crucial issue in the future of news, so I hope the following discussion adds a little bit of information — if not clarity — to how one major news organization is approaching copyright on the Internet.

Headlines and ledes

Tom Curley, president and chief executive of the AP, raised a ruckus last month when he seemed to tell The New York Times that using an AP headline that linked to the original article would require a copyright license. Among the more entertaining responses to that position was a blog whipped up by developer Andy Baio, who used the AP’s own RSS feeds to republish headlines, ledes, and URLs in the style to which Curley appeared to object. Baio called the simple act of protest Associated Repress.

I described the site to Kasi, who told me: “I think that the person doing that: wonderful. We celebrate free speech.” But what if that site carried ads? Could the use of AP headlines and ledes ever amount to copyright infringement? “At some point,” Kasi said, “the variables start to come together that, absolutely, it would be actionable.” We were getting somewhere: Although Kasi didn’t want to lay out a rubric for the AP’s legal strategy, the most important variables appear to be frequency of use and whether that use constitutes a significant, competing, commercial business. So, no, Baio probably wouldn’t get a cease-and-desist letter for his barely read site, even if it were littered with ads, but a more prominent aggregator could.

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“I’m not saying Google’s an enemy, all right?” the chief executive of The Associated Press, Tom Curley, was telling a few people in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “I’m saying they were brilliant, and we didn’t, collectively, license as aggressively as we could have. So now there’s this moment, and the two of them are competing.” He meant Google and Microsoft. “So where does that take us?”

Where, indeed. Since its annual meeting in April, the AP has been vocal, if not precise, about taking a harder line and negotiating better terms with unnamed “portals” that pay to distribute the consortium’s content. He made a similarly vague reference in a speech today at the Xinhua Beijing Media Summit. But in comments earlier this week, Curley was far more specific than ever before about the portals AP is talking to, the nature of those negotiations, and what he really thinks about Google.

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Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, was in China last week for a government-sponsored media summit, where he compared digital content to NCAA basketball and explained the AP’s plans to build revenue online. But Curley was far more revealing when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. I wrote about the big news from that talk on Friday but can now share the audio and transcript.

For all the criticism of Curley and the AP, he had a few really smart observations about the economics of news. Regarding the AP’s competition, which ranges from free news sites to CNN’s new wire service, he was realistic:

Our pricing has to be competitive. There are going to be more competitors. There are going to be fewer people who can afford us. This is a moment of tyranny in the marketplace. There are quality providers, and there are those who aren’t going to be able to sustain the revenues. We don’t expect to have the market share that we used to have.

Speaking broadly about the market for journalists and journalism, Curley was candid:

The truth is, again, the market for news is growing. But the reality is — and none of us can create some fantasy picture here — there is an oversupply, at least in the short term, of us. And so that is creating some differences in the market, and I see these being resolved by innovation and creativity over time.

Oh, there were silly remarks, too, like his misuse of the word “crowdsourcing” and his flat declaration that “we’re all done with random search.” (If that sounds like an ad for Bing, consider it another sign of a looming partnership between Microsoft and the AP.) Others will be interested in his explanation of how the AP will change the licenses for online distribution of its content.

Some comments that I reported on Friday aren’t contained in this recording, which covers Curley’s opening remarks and a question-and-answer session that followed. (Those additional comments are from a separate small-group chat with Curley after his speech, and my source has asked me not to post that audio.) You can download the audio, listen to it below, or read the transcript after the jump.

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Here’s the full transcript: Keep reading »