This week, the Newspaper Association of America held its annual meeting in San Diego, and the occasion seems to have brought out some sharp knives. Rupert Murdoch launched into an attack on Google, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the newspaper industry that it needed to transform its business model, and the Associated Press announced a new initiative to go after unauthorized use of its stories. You'd be forgiven for thinking that an all-out war was brewing between the newspapers and the Internet, but neither of these entities speak with a unified voice, and the arguments appear to be blurring a number of overlapping issues.

At the most basic level, the news industry is facing the sort of copyright problems that are plaguing other content industries in the digital era. Some sites simply reproduce other's content in its entirety, with varying degrees of attribution and linkage. With everything there, however, there's little reason to refer to the original, so this practice almost certainly costs the content creators money. The AP is not alone in being victimized by this—it happens to Ars all the time—but this seems to be one of the targets of their new initiative, and there's nothing unreasonable per se about attempting to stop the unauthorized reproduction of a work.

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are sites that print short excerpts from larger stories, originating from various news sources, again with varying degrees of credit and linkage. In many cases, the commentary accompanying these excerpts is extensive—the excerpts are used as part of a larger commentary that provides some transformative value, which should place things within the realm of fair use. Others simply dump the paragraphs while providing little more than the textual equivalent of "interesting." These probably fail the fair use test, and may wind up targeted by the AP.

Of course, this category includes a broad spectrum of behaviors, and there's a very real chance that any efforts directed against the publishing of excerpts may wind up creating a messy court fight. There's also an argument to be made that these short excerpts, even ones that run afoul of fair use, probably provide a net gain for the content creators, as they direct people to the site that might not have found it otherwise. If that's the case, then any efforts to crack down on these sites by the content providers will be the quintessential shot to the foot.

Where things get a bit more strange is the apparent targeting of Google, which reproduces a bare minimum of a news story as part of its aggregation service. The search giant isn't mentioned in the AP's announcement at all. Instead, AP Chairman Dean Singleton said his group would pursue legal and legislative actions against portals and other sites that do not properly license content. According to the tech blog at The Los Angeles Times, Google's CEO Schmidt says that his company has a multi-million dollar content deal with the AP, so it doesn't seem to be the target of these threats.

The portal sites that do seem to be in danger here are sites that, like Google, sometimes print very short excerpts when linking to original material, such as Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot. Here, the logic seems even less compelling. Those that don't click through and are satisfied by small excerpts are unlikely to have bothered with the original coverage in the first place. Otherwise, these sites seem likely to provide the original content producers with readers they wouldn't have otherwise received.

So what's really going on here? The issue seems mostly to be about anger. Despite the fact that Google seems to think it's got an agreement in place that covers its use of AP content, and that the remainder falls within fair use, the AP's attack comes at a time where other press sources have specifically called out the company for its use of copyrighted material and encouraging people to view content as free. Schmidt has almost certainly caused further antagonism by lecturing the industry on how it needed to reinvent itself, based on the report from the LA Times, linked above.

Since the economic crisis hit, the newspaper industry has seen immense cutbacks, the closing of newspapers in two major US cities, and threats to close more. It's no surprise that some in the news industry feel the need to lash out, and Google makes a convenient target, as they run ads on Google News, then sell the newspapers ads to run with the actual articles they link. It reminds me of nothing so much as the angry denunciations of Apple by the music industry, which was incensed that it managed to make money both by selling the iPod and some of the music that filled it.

We have a pretty good sense of where that anger, and the lawsuits its spawned, have landed the music industry—and they started out in good financial shape. Schmidt may not be offering them a viable alternative, but attacking Google is missing the point, and attacking sites that send traffic their way is certainly not a solution.