Protecting The AP’s Intellectual Property

Back in January I started the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland, and one of my classes this semester was about information policy. One of the main assignments was to write an issue brief about a contemporary topic, and my classmate Ryan Sydlik and I focused on the new Associated Press initiative, launched in April this year, to better protect its intellectual property from online content scrapers.

Our AP Intellectual Property brief (click to access the report) is posted in The Bivings Group research section where we post our other research. This brief compliments our studies about how the news media uses the Internet.

In our brief we discuss:

• the tactics that the AP has announced it will use to protect its intellectual property,
• how companies like Google and Yahoo! fit into this controversy,
• how the current economic downturn has exacerbated the needs for news organizations to protect their intellectual property,
• the importance of "The Link Economy" that the AP is taking a risk of upsetting, and
• how fair use and DMCA notices might play into the AP's legal strategy.