I have some disconcerting news to report on today's Legal Monday.

In a move that it will surely regret, the Associated Press (AP) declared war on the internet. Maybe that's a slight overstatement, but the AP will certainly rue the day it decided to adopt a policy of sending DMCA take-down notices to bloggers and social news aggregators.

Last week, the AP sent seven DMCA take-down notices to The Drudge Retort, a site parodying The Drudge Report and serving as a social news aggregator. The 8,500 site users create blog entries with links to interesting news articles on the web.

Rogers Cadenhead, owner of the Drudge Retort, received a letter from the AP's attorneys claiming that the Drudge Retort was infringing on the AP's copyright by allowing its users to publish short (39 to 79 words) quotations from AP articles with links back to the original. Five of the six alleged infringements used different titles than the original AP article. The seventh claimed infringement was in a blog comment that used a short quote of an original AP article and linked back to it.

Cadenhead provides the following example of an alleged infringement on his site detailing the claims:

Here's one of the six disputed blog entries:

Clinton Expects Race to End Next Week

Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. "I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds," she said. "I think that is the natural progression that one would expect."

If you follow the link, you'll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.

While this is the most surprising and poorly conceived of the AP's anti-internet campaigns, it is not the first. The AP sued Moreover, All Headlines News, and Google for copyright-related claims.

According to the New York Times, the AP has retreated from its staunch position and admitted that it was "heavy handed" in its treatment of bloggers.

I'm relieved to hear that the AP is rethinking its policy, but I'm still a bit skeptical given the AP's recent litigious history. The AP talks about embracing the internet era, but its actions consistently demonstrate a desire to return pre-internet days where distribution control was vital for earnings.

So here's a little gratis news flash to the AP: Links are the currency of the internet. Instead of harassing bloggers etc., you should be praising them for bringing people to your content. It's a very poor business decision to ask people not to facilitate access to your product. The people posting and commenting on aggregator sites like Digg and Mixx are clicking through to your stories, thereby increasing your revenue. Many bloggers are indicating that they will stop linking to AP stories at all.

Also, from a legal perspective, an infringement case would be very weak. There is strong argument for a fair use defense here. The little quotations posted by bloggers are not stifling demand for the AP's product. Bloggers are creating demand, not decreasing demand by creating replacement supply. Further, posting excerpts of the articles and linking to the original facilitates and invites critical discussion of the content, one of the primary reasons for the fair use defense.

Whatever internal discussion is going on at the AP right now, I hope that people who understand the value of links and the economy and ethics of the internet will prevail.

Very truly yours,
Sarah Bird