In his most recent post Winer makes the following claim:

Financially, things are looking terrible at AP — as at other news organizations. There’s a general downward trend in the economics of news, and that’s amplified by the downturn in the economy. If we could see AP’s balance sheet, we might conceive of something desperate ourselves…

In the comments, an astute reader notes:

You can read the AP’s balance sheet, Dave, and it’s not at all in bad shape as you claim.

link

In fact, revenues were up and the AP is in the black, despite it being a non-profit and only needing to break even. AP makes money selling content, not something many people can claim.

Dave’s response seems worth an EoW blog post, IMHO.

So what was Dave’s response?

Then there must be something else they saw that made them freak.

The strong reaction was observable. The reason for it, not so clear.

Which is basically his way of saying “I’m still right, even if my facts are wrong.”

Thanks for the email!

Almost everyone seems to be making the story bigger than it is

Here’s the point that Dave is missing (intentionally, in my opinion). There is nothing bigger than a news syndicate trying to control the “conversation of the day.” This is one of the fundamental problems that blogging was intended to “route around” as Dave would put it. He suggests that take-down notices are no big deal. “Their lawsuits will not happen,” he says.

He’s right about the fact that no suits are going to happen. He’s wrong to think that’s an important point in defense of the AP. The reason is simple: if you’re a fat cat like Dave and can afford to defend yourself against a big civil suit, the threat of a law suit is no big deal. If you’re an average person, though, you could not defend yourself against even the most frivolous of suits filed by the AP.

The AP won’t be filing any suits to back-up these take-downs. That doesn’t make the situation better, it makes it worse. It means that somewhere in the bowels of the AP, one of two things is happening: 1) they have a team who really believes they have the right to profit froma 5-word quote, or 2) they know they’re going beyond their rights here and that their threats are unenforceable, but they’re sending the legal threats anyway.

For someone who likes to bad-mouth lawyers and scummy lawyer behavior, he’s really missed the boat on this one. This is bullying, pure and simple.

I find this ironic, though:

the bloggers who just want to lynch AP are engaging in the worst kind of discourse, it’s anti-intellectual, they jump to conclusions, ignore information that contradicts their assumptions that’s easily available, and points of view that don’t agree with theirs.

Dave, rushing to the defense of intellectual discourse. He could not have described his typical course more succinctly.

eye,
I was fascinated by the prospect of having AP photos on my screensaver, so I downloaded Dave’s flickrfan software. After a day or so, however, I became concerned about the copyright implications so, to assuage my fears, I decided to give them a call. The guy I spoke with said he would look into the matter. He called back about an hour later to say that he doesn’t know where Dave is getting the images, but he doesn’t believe that this is on the up-and-up. He said he’d continue to look into it, but he doesn’t think he’ll find anything. He also, in our initial conversation, asked what sort of resolution the pictures were coming in at and seemed genuinely shocked by my reply.

Unless there’s some memo that didn’t get circulated at the AP, it appears that Dave is passing out their pics without their permission. If I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.

[Name Redacted]

Two things, for the record: First, I have not verified the content of the above email and make no representations as to its truth. Second, I would be very, very concerned about enabling the AP feed in FlickrFan. If there’s no agreement between Dave and the AP, simply pulling the enclosures from that feed would likely be considered a copyright infringement (and could bring with it some serious liability).

One grain of salt to add to the above email: I believe a lot of things about Dave, but I have trouble believing that he’d be so stupid as to distribute these images without permission from the AP.

UPDATE: Got some down-time and called around. After a few transfers I was told that FlickrFan is an AP Digital client, although most of the people I talked to had the same reaction cited in the email. What that means, of course, is that Dave is paying for all of us to see the photos. I didn’t get the sense that anyone I talked to really understood the repercussions of allowing thousands of AP photos to be automatically downloaded to one’s harddrive but that’s not really my concern. It appears that FlickrFan is licensed. (While posting this update I got an email from the previous emailer saying essentially the same thing.)