A.P. Achieves New Depths of Cluelessness

You really couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. The Associated Press is well on its way to becoming the RIAA of the news industry. Their latest stunt involves one of their VPs sending a cease and desist letter to a Tennessee radio station (WTNQ), asking them to remove an AP video they had embedded on WTNQ’s website from YouTube.

The source of the YouTube video content? None other than the AP’s own YouTube channel.

That’s right – the AP’s right hand doesn’t even know what it’s left hand is doing. I guess no one told their legal department that they actually have their own YouTube channel on which embedding is turned on… you know, to help videos spread virally across the web.

As funny as this all is, I mostly just find it frightening and depressing. That the Associated Press is so completely clueless when it comes to new media and how the Internet works is not a good sign. And draconian crackdown efforts which backfire so completely and publicly do way more harm than any embedded YouTube video ever could.