A brief history of AP's battles with news aggregators | PBS

May 26, 2009

The news is information, and information wants to be free, as the saying goes. But for news organizations, the news is a product that is collected, recorded and sold for profit. And those profits are now under extreme economic pressure, threatening some news organizations with extinction. Both online and traditional news outlets are regrouping, retrenching and reconsidering their business models in order to survive in the rapidly evolving information economy.

And some news organizations are also looking to the legal system for assistance in protecting their product from the challenges presented by the proliferation of online news sites, including the copying and redistribution of their news stories by unauthorized third parties...