“The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

via A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web – NYTimes.com

Software attached to each article? Brilliant! Sounds so friendly and seamless. I’m sure it will work great.

“Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Here’s a question: So when most newspapers vanish and no one is left using any of the AP’s stuff, will it still exist?

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

Heh. Good luck with that. What an ass.

It’s amazing that we’re watching a former powerful entity kill itself in front of our very eyes.