Get Your Associated Press Videos! Possibly Even If They Send Me A Letter.

Written on April 9, 2009 by Marc Eastman in Newsish

Just because I find this to be one of the greatest news items ever, I’ve got to jump on the Associated Press. The news giant recently sent a cease and desist to one of their own affiliates for embedding video from the AP’s own YouTube page.

Here’s an article from TechCrunch covering the events, with responses from the affiliate and their Twitter messages on the issue. After getting the letter, the affiliate talked to AP, explained they were an affiliate (and that the video in question was from YouTube in any case), but was still told to take the video down. Apparently, the AP exec in question wasn’t even aware AP had a YouTube channel.

So, let’s run through this real quick, though I’m sure everyone gets the idea already. The Associated Press spits out all the news the world will ever need and then some. Various nouns pay AP to be their affiliates, and thus gain the right to distribute said news in their papers, TV shows, online whatsits, and so on. Thus, said affiliates are generally thought to be allowed to… well, do that. Point 2, AP has their own YouTube channel… that they control. They thus control whether or not the videos they put there can be embedded into other websites. Witness the many YouTube channels that do not give people this ability. Associate or not, anyone can go to YouTube and get the embed code for these videos.

Nevertheless, the AP told someone to remove a video they got from YouTube, and that person is actually an affiliate. Could you make yourself more ridiculous?

Well, here we go. Enjoy some news.