Fighting Copyright Infringement With A Smile

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

This week, the Associated Press announced that it was developing a system to “protect news content from unauthorized use online,” i.e., set up some kind of DRM for its articles. To explain just how it plans to eliminate cutting and pasting, the Second Pillar of the Internet (you know what the first one is), it released this helpful clip-art laden graphic:

 

Got it? My takeaway is that authorized news “users” will be able to “mash up” AP stories in what looks like a barrel of radioactive waste. Unauthorized news users will be found via a “tracking beacon” and then subject to “enforcement.” That makes it sound like the AP is going to go all RIAA on news aggregators and clip-happy bloggers, but tech types say it’s hyping its proposed system’s capabilities. 

Ironic Sans’ David Friedman has a far simpler idea. Noting a recent study that “discovered that people are more honest when eyes are watching them, even if the eyes are fake,” he suggests that the AP embed an emoticon-style face in each of its stories:

It’s the Smiley as copy protection. The AP could come up with their own set of ascii eyes, brand it, and include it in every dateline from now on. They could even pretend it has some other official function, like it symbolizes the AP keeping its eyes out for news. But people would see it and know what it means: “This is an AP article. Please don’t steal it unless you would do so even with your own mother watching.”

Brilliant. (Not that it would stop Shepard Fairey from swiping AP photos with eyes in them.) Now please don’t copy this post without permission. 😉

IT'S NOT THAT WE'RE SCREWED WITHOUT TRUMP:

"It's that we're screwed with or without him if we can't show the public that what we do matters for the long term," writes Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein as she kicks off our drive to raise $350,000 in donations from readers by July 17.

This is a big one for us. It's our first time asking for an outpouring of support since screams of FAKE NEWS and so much of what Trump stood for made everything we do so visceral. Like most newsrooms, we face incredibly hard budget realities, and it's unnerving needing to raise big money when traffic is down.

So, as we ask you to consider supporting our team's journalism, we thought we'd slow down and check in about where Mother Jones is and where we're going after the chaotic last several years. This comparatively slow moment is also an urgent one for Mother Jones: You can read more in "Slow News Is Good News," and if you're able to, please support our team's hard-hitting journalism and help us reach our big $350,000 goal with a donation today.

payment methods

IT'S NOT THAT WE'RE SCREWED WITHOUT TRUMP:

"It's that we're screwed with or without him if we can't show the public that what we do matters for the long term," writes Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein as she kicks off our drive to raise $350,000 in donations from readers by July 17.

This is a big one for us. So, as we ask you to consider supporting our team's journalism, we thought we'd slow down and check in about where Mother Jones is and where we're going after the chaotic last several years. This comparatively slow moment is also an urgent one for Mother Jones: You can read more in "Slow News Is Good News," and if you're able to, please support our team's hard-hitting journalism and help us reach our big $350,000 goal with a donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/fighting-copyright-infringement-smile/
www.motherjones.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-25
154233
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UBQUSBEC4DRTMD2N6OBK6HJGRT5ORNDL
<urn:uuid:b8c74fc6-b1ee-4a97-9d26-3c12465322b3>
2021-06-23T03:08:51Z
192.0.66.2
text/html
sha1:CYYEU4GCSFMVZVJAHDXLLLNYDHSMKIWD
<urn:uuid:ff9fc4b4-7b19-42cc-a36f-4817daf12b7b>
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/fighting-copyright-infringement-smile/
response
<urn:uuid:62fec709-f2d6-47b1-a993-a2993f533a7d>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-25
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-232.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/