Hothead Bloggers Vs Bullying AP (Updated)

By Cernig

Have you noticed that the mainstream's pushback on the AP Boycott story is to call us "hothead bloggers"? You'd think by now they would have thought of something original and that actually fit the facts, them being the content creators and all.

What's most amusing is that many of these mainstream media types feel they have to mention that they're bloggers too, as if that somehow disassociates them from mainstream groupthink and gives their spin some independent authority. It's like always mentioning that Bill Clinton was also a sax player as well as President and then implying that somehow his sax playing was the main method of expression of his beliefs.

Where the mainstream's analysis misses the mark is in concentrating on the money angle. One could say that these mainstream media comentators have a dog in the fight - and it isn't as bloggers.

For small non-profit bloggers however this is an exercise in politics and PR, not media power and money. We smaller blogs cannot possibly go toe-to-toe with AP and neither should we. But we’re largely activists, not media professionals looking to calculate who wins or loses in the money stakes. We’ll individually cease linking to AP as a self-protection measure and collectively do so as a boycott because it plays to our strengths and will get attention on the issue - with the small bloggers correctly cast in the role of underdogs.

If AP is backing down, it isn’t doing so out of generosity but because of that generated publicity. That makes it an effective tactic by grassroots activists who are reaching for the only leverage they have, not a tantrum by hotheads.

Update: Here's what the brave new blogging world according to AP appears to consist of - we should pay them $2.50 a word to excerpt their stories.

Bugger that.

And the "hotheaded" but relatively cash-flush Kos has thrown down the gauntlet on behalf of us smaller fish.

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I'm going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I've got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP -- an organization famous for taking its members work without credit -- will either back down and shut the hell up, or we'll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn't get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they'll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

Nice one, Marcos. Thank you. Now that's the way to lead from the front, dude. Keep doing it and pretty soon we'll all be forced to take back anything we may have said about the Great Orange Satan in the past.

Update 2 : Hypocrisy alert! AP quoted 154 words from one of Patterico's posts yesterday -and he definitely didn't get $2.50 a word. That's always the way of bullies - "do as we say, not as we do."

Update 3: There are a fair few people asking "who are the Media Bloggers Association" and why do they think they have the authority to negotiate with AP on behalf of all bloggers? Well--they don't think they are.

The MBA were brought in by Rogers Cadenhead of Drudge Retort to advise him on the original 7 DMCA takedown suits that started all this furore. It's the mainstream media who are spinning it AP's way by suggesting that the MBA is talking for all bloggers, not the MBA. AP and the rest of the mainstream would rather spin the story as them handing down the holy writ on fair use to some over-arching bloggers association - it sets a nice narrative precedent for calling any naysayers hotheads - but that isn't how the MBA are playing it at all.