Not Everyone on Board with AP Anti-Piracy Plan

Who's the holdout keeping AP from moving forward with its plan to get paid?

Associated Press CEO Tom Curley was on Charlie Rose last night, where he put a bit more meat on the skeleton of the initiative announced earlier this week to combat unauthorized, unremunerated online use of its content by blogs and aggregators.

Curley said AP is looking at dividing its offerings into three "buckets" and then creating different levels of access to each of those buckets, with help from its member organizations. "We can imagine restricting the number of headlines, restricting the number of first paragraphs that get out there, we can imagine keeping a lot of photos back, and we can imagine keeping the full text back," he said. "We have heard from every major media company except one that they are in support of it."

I asked an AP spokesman which company it is that hasn't yet signed on to AP's vision; he said he'd check on it and get back to me.

Curley also addressed speculation that Google is the main misappropriator of AP content, despite its multi-million-dollar licensing deal with the wire service. At least, I think he addressed it. Maybe you can make sense of this answer:

You know, Google is out there, and everyone is trying to make it into an AP, Google, and AP trying to out-Google Google. I assure you that's not where we want to go. Google is a licensed user of AP, but it's what happens to it in the web that goes beyond that license that we need to pull back, and that's what we're working on.

And here's what he had to say about the prospect of monetizing news with micropayments:

I'm not sure micropayments will work. I think you need some business operation that is a collector. The cable model is one that keeps coming back. We see that happening with mobile sooner. But I think you can imagine premium types of content where people do pay directly, that would be more limited applications, probably one or two percent here, five or six percent there. But, you can restrict your content and how it's used and make sure that more of it comes back to your site originally if you put some out and bring some back. So I think that's the simplest and the one that will go further the fastest.