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:
Online Journalism Blog 
Yoz’s blog post on this is well worth reading: http://cheerleader.yoz.com/2009/07/journalism-is-picking-up-the-phone.html
V interesting, as ever.
For me I’ve always assumed that AP is just another doomed ‘middle man’ fighting in vain to give itself a purpose…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=89
Nothing I’ve either seen or read of late would persuade me otherwise.
Best,
R
It sounds like the kind of scheme devised by your Aunt Molly, who just got an internet inside her computer at home and is looking things up on the Google.
Really, I thought AP might consider actually checking these things out before coming up with ludicrous ideas like DRM hardcoded into text. It sounds similar to what the Daily Mail does with copy and paste, no more.
Also worth reading is Steve Yelvington’s analysis. The hnews microformat is a great idea that “got sucked into the swirling vortex of panic and craziness that reigns at a lot of media companies these days,” he says.