Protect, point and pay

Zachary Seward, at the Nieman Journalism Lab, has released the full confidential Associated Press document about how they plan to control, select and track which bits of their content gets out to the world-wide web.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of taking action at the moment. With its traditional media customers under unprecedented financial pressures, AP simply can't continue to provide the same qualithy of global news coverage under the current rules, where secondhand news gets most of the eyeballs. Emboldened by the uncertain state of the law around content use online, third parties are moving quickly to fortify their own positions. AP has both business and legal imperatives to assert its intellectual property rights, make affirmative efforts to protect them and create a structured way to enforce them".