No one gets a gold star for predicting the backlash over the Associated Press’ cease-and-desist action over blog reproduction of portions of AP content, because it’s a familiar knee-jerk reaction.

And as many have already pointed out, calls for boycotting AP material are hollow, precisely because the boycotters don’t actually pay for the stuff in the first place. The idea that reproduction of articles via a million blogs leading to greater exposure and benefit for the AP is so much nonsense, too. Besides, given that bloggers as a group are notoriously lazy, they’re not going to hunt through Google News results for that hard-to-find non-AP writeup to use in their linkage citations; they’ll use today’s news of guideline development between the news organization and professional bloggers as an excuse to announce a “victory” and a subsequent return to business-as-usual.

But here’s the basic breakdown for why the AP is (mostly) in the right on this:

- Copy-and-paste techniques result in keyword seeding on the blog reproducing the content. If that blog is being indexed by Google and the other search engines, and its running AdSense and other relevance-triggered ad displays, that converts to money. And it’s a zero-sum game: Visitors drawn to that blog get diverted from an AP member news site, and the potential revenue from an ad click-through is lost by the legit AP source. That’s the heart of this, and why even a portion of the content copied is significant.

- Regardless of the purposes of copy-and-pasting an entire article — strictly for the writer’s reference, avoidance of linkrot to the original source — it amounts to public republication, intentional or not.

So what’s the acceptable limit? I try to be careful when blockquoting referencing material, with a mind to keeping what’s in my post as short as possible. I do that both to keep my recap as succinct as possible (while preserving the gist of the citation), and to keep from simply copying someone else’s work. But I’m aware that even a snippet that consists of a couple of sentences is enough to draw the searchbots, and affects what appears in my AdSense boxes. So yeah, I’m as “guilty” as Drudge Retort or any other blogger, although the degree varies.

In this light, I’m wondering if the search engines need to get involved. If content is enclosed in the [blockquote] formatting, that should suggest that it’s not originally-produced by that blog/site; maybe that’s a tag for indexbots to ignore or deemphasize it for search/monetization purposes? It won’t be a perfect solution, by a long shot, because most bloggers won’t adhere to even minor strictures, but it’s a level of examination worth exploring.