AP doth protest too much, methinks.

It’s interesting how often the people who scream the loudest about a problem are the ones who in fact are vulnerable to precisely the criticism they are voicing.  I’m no psychologist, though you clearly need no professional degree to understand that zealotry apparent certainty can betray insecurity. AP has of late been rather extreme in its rush to protect its rights in copyrighted material. Now AP seems poised to take on Google’s contention that it is engaged in non-infringing fair use when it engages in its regular practice of displaying the headline and lead paragraph, along with credit and a direct link, of the news stories published by, among others, AP.

As Larry Dignan points out on ZDNet, AP regularly — a lot, every day — reports stories that are based purely on other public sources without either acknowledging or linking to those sources.  He concludes that “once folks figure out they can damn near replicate most of the AP just by finding source material things are going to get ugly quickly.”