Deep Currents

In the latest news about news, the Associated Press just announced a new project: charging everyone for its content. You might wonder why they didn’t before, but take a moment to think about all those places you find news on the Internet, not only in news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News, and the Huffington Post, but also in countless blogs. The former pay the AP a tidy sum (thanks Kaizar for the correction), but the blogosphere doesn’t, even though A-list bloggers gather a lot of eyeballs and garner a decent amount of ad revenue. Using AP headlines and story snippets is legal under the doctrine of “fair use,” or so they argue, though they haven’t had to test out that idea in court. Now the AP is arguing that the current circumstances (read: the fast-arriving death of the newspaper industry) are good enough reason for the sharing of their content under “fair use” (now labeled a “misguided legal theory”) to convert to a new arrangement that will pay the AP its “fair share.” They haven’t worked out the details just yet, but their stated intention is to demand revenue-sharing agreements from aggregators in the very near future. If the bloggers won’t cough up, the AP will sue. Watch this space. (Update: more details here from Search Engine Watch.)

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I’ve just gotten around to reading The Green Collar Economy, which the social justice and environmental advocate Van Jones put out last fall as part of his Green For All initiative. (If you want a cheat sheet, check out the wonderful review over at TreeHugger.) His argument is sophisticated but fits comfortably in a nutshell: fighting poverty and fighting climate change are symbiotic political goals which are stronger when pursued together. In other words, if we’re going to use taxes or cap-and-trade to force decarbonization, why not emphasize the social justice benefits of employing millions of “green-collar” workers in the process?

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I was just in the middle of some reading up on sustainability when I came across a report from the Senate Minority called “More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.” I’d just seen a TED talk denying climate change by the guy who invented PCR, so I was curious, and all the more so since the Council on Foreign Relations labeled it a “vital primary source underpinning the foreign policy debate.” …more