The more they struggle, the more they sink into the tar pit:
Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that Web sites that used the work of news organizations must obtain permission and share revenue with them, and that it would take legal action against those that did not.
A.P. executives said they were concerned about a variety of news forums around the Web, including major search engines like Google and Yahoo and aggregators like the Drudge Report that link to news articles, smaller sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole, and companies that sell packaged news feeds.
If the A.P. had any fundamental understanding of how the web economy works, it would know that linking and excerpting small portions of the content (with credit given) are good for it and its members. Obviously, sites that reproduce content in whole, or close enough to whole that no one has any reason to visit the original content, are problematic for them, but sites that build lists of links and excerpts for their content are only driving more viewers to their content which means greater advertising exposure for them.
What the A.P. is unwilling to accept is that the advertising model is just dying. Slowly, but surely, it is dying as a reliable source of revenue. It was bound to happen when the number of sites where it could appear exploded out of control. Advertising space, like all things in the market, is governed by the law of supply and demand and there is a increasingly large glut of advertising spaces with which they compete. Every effort they can successfully take to encourage others to send hits to them increases their audience, which in turn increases the leverage that they have with their advertisers. The best thing for the A.P. would be to be the single most excerped and linked source of information for news online as that would send hundreds of millions of additional hits to their outlets!
That's probably expecting a mite much from an organization which harasses its own members for embedding videos from its very own YouTube channel which it officially publishes.
They're a hopeless case; even at a novice level in a business that requires some level of social-interaction, one learns that repeat business is the foundation for survival.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
Maybe they'll sick the Feds on violators like the movie studios did with that Wolverine pre-release.
Thank God my tax dollars are looking out for the billion dollar Hollywood folks.
I could see AP folding in a few years (or less). Not because of their supposed losses, but because they're apparently run by idiots.