Associated Press to protect news with Digital Rights Management

The organisation wants to be able to earn money from the many times that AP content is used or quoted from on the internet. The registry of its content and re-formatting of its stories are the basis of a system, effectively a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), that it hopes will allow it to increase its earnings.

"What we are building here is a way for good journalism to survive and thrive," said Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Directors and vice chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group Inc. "The AP news registry will allow our industry to protect its content online, and will assure that we can continue to provide original, independent and authoritative journalism at a time when the world needs it more than ever."

AP said that it would publish its news in a new 'microformat' which would give it greater control of the content that it publishes.

"The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational 'wrapper' that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage," said an AP statement.

Many news providers are seeking ways to benefit from the use to which other companies put their material. News aggregators such as Google News take headlines and story openings from newspaper websites and publish them all together.

Newspapers, broadcasters and agencies see this as a threat to their business but are reluctant to use the easy technical fix which would keep their material out of the aggregators' services because this would reduce the internet traffic to their sites.

Some are seeking ways to gain more control over the use of material without giving up the traffic that sites such as Google bring. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) is promoting a system which strives to give members more control, and AP's is another system that attempts to give control to producers.

Aggregators and other users of material, such as bloggers, argue that their use is permitted under copyright law's 'fair dealing' or 'fair use' exemptions, which allow some uses of copyright material.

Publishers' group the European Publishers' Council (EPC) joined with the WAN last month and demanded better protection from aggregation from the European Commission.

Publishers in Germany are seeking changes to copyright law to give them more protection and the Belgian publishers' group Copiepresse has pursued successful legal action against Google over its Google News service.

AP chief executive Tom Curley told the New York Times, though, that it wanted to emulate the success of Google in generating advertising income.

"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” he told the paper, adding that he wanted AP's articles to be as widely used as they are now, but wanted them to be paid for.

AP said that it would apply the changes to AP content now, to member content in 2010 and ultimately to photos and video material as well as articles.