If I hadn't seen this reported in multiple places, I'd be sure that someone was pullling my leg - the AP wants to ban the "copyright theft" of excerpting a headline and a link, unless you have a license agreement with them. From the Times:

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.

There's a plan - make the AP invisible, and then people will flock to pay them for the ability to link to headlines. I'm reminded of King Canute, commanding the waves to stop.

What the AP wants is simple; it wants to charge people for the right to link to their content. Again from the Times, here's their explanation:

News organizations already have the ability to prevent their work from turning up in search engines — but doing so would shrink their Web audience, and with it, their advertising revenues. What The A.P. seeks is not that articles should appear less often in search results, but that such use would become a new source of revenue.

I love the technical theory behind this, too:

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital "wrapper," data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

Right - tossing a few tags around things is going to work. Here's a question: presumably, they could pound American based search engines into submission if they found a court that would go along with them. What about overseas based ones? That's just the most obvious hole in this plan.

Here's the bigger one: say I'm reading a website, like the Times, and I read an AP story. I decide to link to the AP story (as I've linked to the Times story here) - do I personally need to have a license agreement with the AP? Does every person writing online? Most of us aren't journalists working for big outfits; most of us are simply expressing an opinion on some topic or other of interest to us. How does the AP think this is going to work? The most likely result is simple: if linking to an AP story looks like it might be trouble, we just won't bother. Reuters, AFP, the BBC (et. al.) can get the link instead.

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