socialmedian: A.P. Exec Doesn’t Know It Has A YouTube Channel: Threatens Affiliate For Embedding Videos

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clips

A.P. Exec Doesn’t Know It Has A YouTube Channel: Threatens Affiliate For Embedding Videos

Source: TechCrunch

Apr 08, 2009

Summary

Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.

You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.

Frank Stovel, an employee at the radio station who tried to talk some sense into the A.P. executive Twittered yesterday:

I was on the phone arguing w/ AP to

...Read the full article

Comments (2)