Associated Press Declares War on New Media. Isn’t That Just Adorable?

Well, it’s happening again. A long while back I wrote on this issue and then heard very little about it. I was hoping the AP would submit to the inevitable with more grace, but it seems that is not the case. The AP, with all of its venerable power, has decided that the best way to deal with its own looming obsolesence is to go the route of the RIAA and the MPAA: they are going to sue people that threaten their monopoly. Let’s break this down a bit.

For a very long time, the market for intellectual content was dominated by the machinery of production and distribution. Record companies were the only ones who could afford to record and distibute music, studios did the same with movies and television, and the publishing companies did it with books, comics, and magazines. The Associated Press is an organization like the MPAA and the RIAA. It is a collection of news companies that was very used to having absolute control over their medium and market. They do not exist for some altruistic purpose of keeping people informed…they exist as a quasi-legal cartel, able to operate only because their activities do not interfere with competition (amongst themselves).

This organization, like its siblings in the other markets, got broadsided by the new technologies of the internet. Their entire means of controlling their markets, which was the control of production and distribution, is gone. Kaput. Obsolete. They no longer control anything at all. We can do it ALL ourselves. We can make the media, distribute it, promote it, and profit on it, all without their vast machinery created over a century of profiteering. They are, in a word, irrelevant. They could realize and embrace this, creating a new business model for a new era, and realize that the thing they used to sell is now available for free so they need to sell something else. But instead they want to try to hang on, to enforce their traditional market domination by an act of law rather than real competition.

So this is what I am going to do, and I advise all other bloggers and new media people to do the same: show the AP the truth of its current position. Ignore them. Don’t link to them, don’t spread any story that links to them, and in general show them that their little club of middle-men is irrelevant. They want to declare war (have you ever noticed there is a certain demographic in the USA that is always declaring war on things?) on new media, as if such a thing was possible. This is like primitive neanderthals declaring war on modern homo sapiens…what are they going to do, print stories about how nasty bloggers are in their newspapers no one reads? Maybe they will take out an ad in a magazine no one buys? In the end, however, they are irrelevant. We can do quite well without them. The only reason any of these industries existed was because of a limitation on production and distribution that no longer exists.

So boycott the AP. Link to nothing, spread nothing, post nothing. Let them die without any of our lives being destroyed by meaningless lawsuits meant to be object lessons. Show them just how useless and irrelevant they are.

End of rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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