NEW YORK The board of directors of The Associated Press approved a new licensing policy Thursday governing online use of AP content by its member news organizations, but will not charge a separate fee for such use.
The board of the news cooperative chose to roll fees for online usage into a 2.2 percent annual increase in the overall fees it will charge its members in 2006.
As part of the new policy, the AP is asking its members to help monitor and prevent unauthorized use of its news, photos and other material by other parties.
The news cooperative's board of directors, meeting in Park City, Utah, also voted to launch an online video news service that will use footage from the company's worldwide video newsgathering service, APTN. The AP said in a statement that the new service, to be called the AP Online Video Network, would provide member news organizations with a video player for their Web sites that would display video from AP as well as other content.
Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer, announced in April at the annual meeting of the 157-year-old news cooperative in San Francisco that the AP would begin charging newspapers and broadcasters to post its stories, photos and other content online. At the time, the company said it would establish a separate fee, which would be initially offset by a smaller-than-average annual increase in its overall fees.
The AP ended up deciding to roll the fees for online use into the overall assessment after its board decided that it would be too complicated to set up a separate fee structure, Curley said in an interview.
"The effort here was to find something that was easily understood while allowing AP to move forward with tightening its digital license agreements," he said.
The AP is a cooperative owned by its member news organizations, and its board is comprised largely of newspaper executives. It reported that its revenues rose 6 percent to $630.1 million in 2004 and that its loss narrowed to $728,000 from an $11.1 million loss in 2003.
The online use policy affects only AP's members, which include more than 1,500 newspaper and 5,000 broadcast outlets. The AP also sells some of its news to commercial Internet sites such as Yahoo Inc. under separate licensing agreements.
The AP said in a statement that the specific terms of the licensing policy for members would be laid out later this year. The new policy goes into effect Jan. 1.
Like music and entertainment companies and other producers of copyrighted material, news organizations are increasingly concerned about protecting their material from unauthorized use online as more people go to the Internet for news and information.
As part of the new online licensing plan, the AP is asking its members for cooperation in monitoring and preventing the unauthorized use of AP material online by other parties. The new policy also gives members permission to send AP material to mobile devices and to Web users via syndication links known as RSS feeds.
The news cooperative has allowed re-use of its material online by its members at no extra cost since 1995, when the Internet was in its infancy as a mass medium.
Now, protecting their copyrights online has become a major concern for news organizations. Agence France-Presse, a French news agency, is suing Internet giant Google Inc., claiming that Google's news site is illegally using AFP's copyrighted material.
The AP said in a statement that the 2006 increase of 2.2 percent will be the lowest since 1999, when the increase was the same size. The AP raised the fees it charges its members 2.3 percent for 2005 and 2.9 percent for 2004.
In addition, the board also approved a total 4.5 percent increase for some broadcast services in 2006.
The new online video service is expected to launch this fall, said Jane Seagrave, AP's vice president for new media markets and the executive responsible for overseeing the company's online business operations.
Demand for online video has been growing as more people use high-speed connections that allow video to be displayed more clearly than before. More than half of all U.S. households now use broadband connections to the Internet such as cable modems or DSL lines.
The service will be supported by advertising, which will be sold through a partner organization. It will be directed primarily to the AP's members, but would also be available to non-member sites.
The video service will be offered free of charge, and the revenues will be split between the AP and the individual members depending on how much viewer traffic each site brings to the network.
