The Information Mafia Cometh

In light of the hysteria generated by the Google’s Public Policy Blog. Alexander calls Google’s partnership with the AP “an experiment” before illustrating why such partnerships ideally are unnecessary for aggregators:

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find [pdf]. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index -- all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags."

And such has been the argument presented to those who complain, the AP chief among them. A simple question: If aggregators are somehow stealing from you, why don’t you opt out? The simple answer is, as always: we need them to drive traffic and gain exposure.

Despite apparent reliance on aggregators, it doesn’t stop Rupert Murdoch (one of the newest directors of the AP) right-hand man and Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson from describing aggregators as “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet” or simple tweet? Will that be off limits too? Will it work both ways? Will it be okay for newspapers to take a MySpace post and