Associated Press Hardens Stance …… Again

The AP as it is called has hardened its stance on the information they say is theirs, hardening their stance by threatening legal action for people and blogs that scrape their content. This is the battle that is engulfing the internet where most of traditional media is finding it hard to accept the utter openness of the web. The internet is a truly public place and as we have seen again and again, ownership of material in court is utterly futile and quite useless. Why, well everybody sees the internet as public domain and that anything they see they can tell, even if the privacy statement says you don’t, can’t and shouldn’t.
This is why traditional media steered away from early adoption of using the net as another avenue to publish media for exclusivity of the information they place on the web quickly becomes public and is almost surely scraped from the moment it is posted. Policing the internet for such copied content isn’t easy and defining true scraping is quite hard and who’s to enforce the law on the web? Even the FBI, FTC and other law enforcement agencies though they are working hard, can catch only a small fraction of the many people who engage in illegal activity over the internet. Time may come when such information safeguarding technology may become possible but for the meantime, it’s still quite impossible for anybody to enforce.