Associated Press have warned they will start taking action against news aggregrators like Google. Rupert Murdoch made similar noises last week.
As Fred Wilson has pointed out, the problem for AP and News is the web is now the newstand and taking publications off the shelves is not good business sense.
We see that with the Australian Financial Review. Its position as an Australian journal of record has been diminished by Fairfax’s incompetent obsession with protecting content.
As result, other channels such as The Australian, Business Spectator and blogs have stepped into the vaccuum and eroded the AFR’s online authority.
Following the RIAA path and suing Google, the Huffington Post and any blog that dares link to their sites will backfire on the news industry just as it did on the record industry.
In many ways newspapers are even more vulnerable as journalists employed by organisations like News and AP are quick to rip stories off from blogs, web forums or MySpace and Facebook pages with little regard for permission or attribution.
I suspect it’s one legal quagmire Associated Press or Rupert Murdoch might rue becoming bogged down in at the very time their business models are challenged by both economic and technological change.