(Note: Drudge Retort has no apparent relationship with Drudge Report by Matt Drudge.)

On June 10 the Associated Press demanded that Drudge Retort, a community blog site, remove 7 posts which it claimed violated its copyright under the DMCA. Rogers Cadenhead, owner of Drudge Retort, shared the takedown request on Friday on his blog, Workbench, along with the details of the 7 posts that are alleged to infringe AP’s copyright. Most of these fall within the “fair use” provision of the copyright act, as it has been understood by much of the online community.

Over the weekend, the Internet pushed back, expressing a wide range of concerns about the AP’s new policy. Describing the dispute as “…a legal spat between a smarmy little social news site and the biggest purveyors of news in bulk in the US (AP),” Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb worried, “The AP’s move could impact a lot of innovation all around the web, however.” In “RIAA of news biz? “David Rothman at Teleread posted “The AP has done many clueful things, and in fact, I’d hate for it to go out of business, given all the synergies between old and new media. But this is a classic case of a media Goliath begging for a well-placed stone in the forehead.”

Mathew Ingram, in “Someone please buy AP a clue” asserted: “The bottom line is that the press agency’s case constitutes yet another in a series of creeping assaults on the idea of ‘fair use’…” At The Industry Standard, Jordan Golson added context to the discussion, noting a previous lawsuit between AP and commercial news aggregator Moreover. He continued,

There has not been a significant blogger v. mainstream media copyright battle yet, but the Associated Press sure isn’t making any friends with this maneuver. Influential media critic Jeff Jarvis slams the organization in a blog posting titled “FU AP“. Jarvis has a long-standing beef with the AP about the organization’s lack of credit for original reporting and linking when it repurposes reporting from member newspapers.

This morning, the AP responded with an effort to explain its position via the New York Times The article described the AP position on ‘fair use’ as “unusually strict.” “On Saturday, author Saul Hansell continued, “The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.” He quotes Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of the AP in a Saturday interview,

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

Unlike the RIAA’s use of the DMCA to sue “grandma and the kids for stealing music,” those concerned about the AP’s action are networked, organized, motivated and have financial clout. Golson’s contended that “the AP doesn’t have “inbound links” or “search juice” — only member organizations do.” But the member organizations make their advertising revenue at least partly from those “inbound links” and “search juice.” So if the value of using AP as a news source is diminished in the eyes of their customers, that will hurt their business. Already, there is a boycott petition online with 57 signatories at this time.

It’s early in this discussion; it only began 3 days ago. I doubt that AP will succeed in any attempt to enforce “guidelines” which are more restrictive than those apparently granted by the current copyright law. And while lawyers, bloggers and the rest of the media hash out some sort of consensus, its quite possible that the APs business will suffer. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. If the AP doesn’t get this resolved quickly, it may become another formative battle in the power shift from “old” to “new” media.