Some argue that the DMCA powers are being used to infringe upon users' online freedoms -- and frequently.  The latest and perhaps most thought provoking DMCA battle is building between the Associate Press (AP) and The Drudge Retort, a social news/blog owned by Rogers Cadenhead, over the reposting of AP article snippets.

Interestingly, the AP is attacking both the owner for his news posts that occasionally contain small excerpts of AP text linked to the original story, and his users who similarly post snippets from various web stories on the internet in the contents.  In both cases, the AP says this makes these pages in question DMCA takedown fodder. 

Pursuit of action against the first alleged type of offense -- site-run reprints -- could threaten many news distribution sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Mixx, which bring news to millions of users a day.  The second purported illegal offense -- users reposting comments is even more far-reaching as users on major news sites frequently have users post snippets from AP articles.

The second allegation in particular is raising a provocative question -- should commenters' actions result in punishment of a site?  If so, this would mean news sites must scour every user post and try to determine if it contained copyrighted content.  While The Drudge Retort is a relatively small fish, the questions raised by the AP's attack are salient to most of the online industry, from news sites, to the multitude of forums that see similar posts.

While it’s possible that major outlets like AP will only target minor, relatively weak targets like The Drudge Retort, some fear that they may begin to target multiple sites, similar to the RIAA's campaign against filesharers.  In the AP lawyers' letter to Cadenhead, they state their belief that "The Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use."

They continue, "AP considers taking the headline and lead of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation."

Seven takedown notices were filed in total against the site. 

The AP is a wire service, both online and offline which writes news stories that are reprinted for heavy fees by member outlets.  The service does not have its own "inbound links" or "search-juice", contrary a misconception held by some bloggers.  Only its members do, which is why they are willing to pay a premium for it.  The AP's stance, while a bit draconian does make sense from one perspective -- if writers could get the content for free, why would they pay AP so much for it?

The attack on the site is part of a growing campaign of legal actions from the AP.  In October they targeted the news site Moreover owned by Verisign, which has similar type of service, but in its case charges users for it and a variety of other content.  However the Moreover case was slightly more blatant as the site was allegedly reposting entire articles without paying.

The AP debate highlights the questions surrounding the rather ambiguous legal concept of "fair use" which is decided on a case by case basis on many determinates.  Among these are whether the use is part of a commercial effort or if it’s for nonprofit.  Other factors include the nature of the work and the size of the excerpted text in relation to the size of the full original text.  Also considered is the effect on the owner of the copyright.

While Moreover is obviously violating fair use by the above definition, it’s harder to tell with The Drudge Retort.  Its owner obviously sees his site and its commenters' use as fair use, while the AP disagrees. 

While the AP has yet to wage full scale online war to similar occurrences which litter the web and online news, this latest case illustrates a more aggressive shift on its stance on fair use.  The ramifications of the case and those that follow may be extremely significant to the future of the online world.