AP

On the AP Mess:

I imagine you've all heard that the AP wants bloggers to pay by the word if we link to their stories and quote any of the text. All of this reminds me of a story.

I believe I've mentioned that -- in addition to being a captain of the volunteer fire department -- my father has spent many years as a telephone man. In the early part of that career, he served AT&T (the old giant megacorporation) in rural Tennessee.

One day they had an inexplicable service outage, so they sent him to see if he could figure out the cause. He was driving along the cable route when he saw a farmer standing by the side of the road, in a hole, swinging an axe into the ground.

He stopped and looked, and sure enough the farmer was chopping up the copper cable. "Excuse me," my father asked him, "What are you doing?"

"Hey there," the farmer replied. "You know, I was plowing this morning and I hit the damndest root I ever saw."

Well, my father explained the situation and summoned a team to repair the damage. The farmer, realizing his mistake, was highly apologetic and got his tractor-backhoe out to dig around the cable so that the repairmen could fix it.

A few days later, the farmer got the bill for the cable repair -- a very expensive bill. He called in to the phone company, and happened to get my father on the phone.

They talked it over for a while, and finally the farmer had to admit that he probably did owe the money. "But," he says, "I haven't sent you my bill for the backhoe service."

Laughing, my father asked him how much he was thinking he'd charge. The farmer named a figure that was precisely the same as the cable repair service charge.

"Send the bill," my father said.

The AP is in the position of deriving traffic, attention and credibility from blogger links. They can, in theory, bill people for using their stuff; but if I were a blogger who received such a bill, I'd think they might also get a bill for the heretofore-free advertising they've been receiving.

I notice Ms. Malkin has had a similar thought.