Although, it does look like they’re coming to their senses a bit. They sent takedown notices to a site that used as few as 39 words out of an AP story, because the quoted bits happened to be the headline and the lede of the article. That means any bookmarklet that might grab the title of a page for a site like Digg or Delicious would end up running afoul of this. It’s stupid.

If they don’t come to their senses, I’m going to join the ban on linking to AP content. This will include sites like CNN, ESPN, etc. that use AP content in their normal coverage. The idea that they would charge $0.50 to $12.50 a freaking word in order to “protect their copyright” means that they don’t deserve to exist.

You can read a summary of what happened to trigger the discussion at the AP site. And, depending on how that meeting goes with the Media Bloggers Association, that could be the last link to an AP story ever.

(I suspect this will be a lesson to everyone out there about how much of the news they read is AP content… since I oversaw the AP wire ingest processes for ESPN.com in my previous job, I know how much content came from the different news services…. a LOT was AP content)

Update: just to put this in context, check out how some of the biggest tech blogs are reacting. A lot of readers will suddenly be reading Reuters…

You should check out Jeff Jarvis’s earlier post on this. I think he has a point — the AP is an anachronism in terms of how it operates. The blended AP style that obfuscates which member paper did the original reporting isn’t really how we source things in the Internet/blogging age. Something does seem quite wrong about it, though I know that editors will freak if they lost the “AP voice” that is reliably the same.

The thing is, as a news consumer, I don’t care about the AP style…