The Associated Press is becoming the enemy of the Internet because it is fighting the link and the link is the basis of the Internet. From Richard Perez-Pena's New York Times story today:
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.
Them's fightin' words: quoting an article's headline while linking to it would require licensing? This means we would have to get permission from and negotiate with sites before linking to them. That would kill the Internet. It also would kill the Associated Press and the news organizations it cons into joining its dangerous crusade -- make that its cartel -- for no one will link to them and they will not be heard.
