The mysterious DRM claims of Associated Press {updated}
Great post at Boing Boing (which AP could learn a thing or two about new business models from) on AP’s recent announcement “that they had spent millions of dollars on a DRM system for news that would limit how you could paste the text you copied from your browser window”. Ed Felten did some digging:
“Unfortunately for AP, the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP’s claims about it. hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn’t “encapsulate” anything in a “wrapper”, nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls.
“AP also says that hNews ” includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online”. This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users. But read the fine print. hNews does include a “rights” field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users’ rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.”
FROM THE COMMENTS: Matthew Somerville points to Yoz Grahame’s excellent post on the subject, which suggests some rather more intelligent ideas and also looks at the Media Standards Trust’s Value-Added News project.
ALSO FROM THE COMMENTS: Steve Yelvington gives a good backgrounder (thanks Martin Stabe).
UPDATE: Via @Quinparker, here’s a much funnier version of AP’s little diagram:
