AP announces plans for independent digital rights clearinghouse

The Associated Press has announced that it wants to work with other news providers to create a new rights clearinghouse to independently manage the licensing of digital content.

Speaking at a meeting of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in Texas yesterday, AP president and CEO Tom Curley said the agency was given the go-ahead to create an independent agency by the company's board of directors last week.

This means that AP will now look to work with other news organisations to establish a separate entity which would provide rights clearance and privacy tools, ways to license content from publishers and media intelligence services about news consumption, a release from AP said.

This would build on the work of the AP News Registry, which was set up to notify the agency about the use of its own content using tags and a tracking device.

"For nearly a decade, the content our industry has created has been losing value on the internet," Curley said at the meeting yesterday, according to a transcript of his speech.

"That’s due mostly to two things. First, the common practice of leaving content exposed on the web to scraping, copying, pasting and aggregating has led to the creation of secondary markets for our content that have siphoned away considerable value.

"Second, and even more frustrating, we’ve stood by watching while others invent creative new uses for our news and reap most, if not all, of the benefit. In general, our digital businesses – AP's in particular – have been driven by repurposing content we created for analog uses. We've watched others innovate the delivery of that news."

"With the audience now clearly online and moving across platform, I’m asking you today to join with AP to act swiftly on these two fronts," he added.

This, he said, will be through the management of rights and distribution of content across online and mobile platforms by a clearinghouse, as well as the creation of new products to "excite the audience and challenge our journalists".

"The clearinghouse will answer a need we heard from multiple businesses for an efficient mechanism to access content from a range of news providers for a variety of uses," he continued.

"This extends to the news industry an approach that has worked successfully in other industries with similar challenges around digital usage.”

AP announced it will also roll out a wider range of white label apps and content modules for portable devices, allowing its member publishers to create their own branded apps, as well as its own private labeled iPad applications.

According to AP more than 70 of its member newspapers and broadcasters have already gone live with white label smart-phone apps developed by the agency.

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