AP to police itself into nonexistence

While I don’t condone stealing copyrighted works, I’ve long recognized the Associated Press’s outright hostility to the Internet. While it could’ve raked in plenty of online advertising dollars, the AP has never played well with the Internet. Never.

Now word comes down that the AP will be going after bloggers who post AP stories.

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under some very misguided, unfounded legal theories,” said Dean Singleton, the AP’s chairman and the chief executive of newspaper publisher MediaNews Group at AP’s annual meeting.

(gosh, I hope I can use that quote safely!)

The AP has never provided proper links to its stories, thus anyone discussing an AP story has to cut-and-paste the desired excerpts because AP stories disappear into the ether so quickly.

Again, I don’t have a problem with the AP trying to make money on its product – some of my closest friends have been quoted in AP stories, after all. When the company shows such evident disdain for its online audience, however, perhaps that audience should rightfully go elsewhere.

Time Warner becomes more evil

Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly hate the cable company any more than you do, they raise the bar on suckiness. Time Warner Cable will soon be implementing bandwidth caps on their high-speed internet users in what looks to be an effort to kill streaming media companies like Netflix. Watching a handful of Netflix-streamed movies each month like my friend Greg Brown does would be enough to push you over the bandwidth cap.

I found out tonight that I’m not immune for being an Earthlink customer and not a Time Warner customer. According to the advocacy website StopTheCap.Com, Time Warner plans to cap Earthlink customers as well. So much for the illusion of competition!

All of this makes me wish we had municipal Internet like down the road in Wilson.