Comments on: AP to digitally monitor copyright

By: Fernando Pereira

Fernando Pereira — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:01:16 +0000

IANAL, but the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions do not mention encryption, they are more generally about any access controls and rights controls. The fact that the wrapper may be inept technically does not necessarily mean that (triavially) breaching is not circumvention.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:28:43 +0000

Not possible, Fernando. The wrapper is apparently just plain text inserted into the HTML. The DMCA is specifically about reverse-engineering encryption. If it’s true DRM, no one is going to be able to read the stuff without a special reader (maybe embedded Flash or Java?), which would essentially turn the AP into a non-entity on the Internet. No one would read. Other sources would fill the gap, acquire revenue therefrom.

By: Fernando Pereira

Fernando Pereira — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:25:01 +0000

Glenn: There’s another possibility, which I just noted on my blog: use the DMCA against those who remove AP content from its tracking wrappers.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:28:43 +0000

The AP is so misguided that it’s hard to know what the outcome will be.

It considers a headline plus a link to be a violation of its rights, which is clearly not going to be enforceable.

It also apparently rejects all notion of fair use, citation, critique, parody, and teaching, all of which have various exceptions in copyright law and court rulings.

If AP follows through on all that, it will essentially waste all its member newspapers fees on litigation, a strategy that hasn’t seemed to work for the RIAA, either.

The technology behind its tracking system is laughable. In one account that seems to provide real detail, the AP will embed microformatted metadata (i.e., fielded text in a known format) inside the HTML of articles. Which won’t track bupkes unless someone using AP content copies that microformat.

This reminds me of the plot of Tom Clancy’s first cyber novel (Rainbow 7?), in which a programmer says that the bad guys hid the malicious code in the copyright notice (somehow).