AP Moves to Monetize Members’ Copyright Assets

In recent years the Associated Press (AP), a cooperative of some 1,500 newspapers, has brainstormed on behalf of publishers ways to get compensated for members’ copyrighted materials circulated online. In mid-2010, the AP launched the News Registry to tag and track such content. Now, as anticipated and as widely reported over the weekend, the AP’s board of directors has approved a business that will license digital rights to that content by this summer. The plan is to expand to broadcasters and overseas participants later.

For those of you questioning how Copyright Clearance Center will react to this, probably not so coincidentally CCC issued a press release this morning announcing a new partnership with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (38 years old, sporting over 300 members which publish over 10,000 journals).