You're missing the point.

We are not asking for anything free. We're not asking for anything nearly free.

We are asking for a reasonable market rate. Like UPI, which we got a much better deal from.

If the AP doesn't want to do business, fine, we can operate without them and do so effectively. We are not aggregators or regurgitators, nor plagiarists. In other words, AP material is a convenience and not a necessity for us.

Interestingly, reporters employed by AP newspapers have used us for sources, have quoted us, have interviewed us, have had us on their radio programs and have used (with our permission) our materials.

You are making some incredible assumptions and those assumptions are erroneous.

We do in fact cover a great deal of the same stories with original material of our own. And in fact have won awards for precisely that.

Further, it doesn't cost five figures to produce 65 articles a year, and if it does, then I need to go into journalism as a career, because apparently that's an easy path to riches. That's especially true when these same articles are already used in local and wire stories and that our audience is a fraction of that.

The price was indeed exorbitant, and what remains a fact is that if AP wants to price customers out of the market, then they will not gain any revenue whatsoever.

I work on a popular sports blog and also another up and coming blog, and both feature commentary on relevant news (college sports and golf.)

We would love to use AP content for our blogs, with proper uasge, citations, trackbacks and the like. So we try to contact AP for licensing information and cannot reach a human and get no call back for weeks.

When they do return our inquiries, they gave us a price so ridiculous that it was impossible to fit it into any workable revenue model. It's not that we are cheap or expected something for nothing, it's just that they wanted a fee so high that it just couldn't be done.

We came away with a definite impression that AP didn't *want* to work with us and that their numbers were just go-away-leave-us-alone figures that they knew they had little chance of getting a sale from.

Now we avoid their material like the plague.

They have another "qualification:" the need to show off how smart they are, irregardless of whether they actually know of what they are talking about.

Reading through the article, it seems that other than AMD's Puma, most of these failures have one thing in common: they are not backward compatible with the chips they replace.

People are loathe to buy a new computer and all-new versions of software to run on it. Look at the 64-bit Windows architectures. How many folks are running 32-bit software on those?

Bottom line is that the software IS the computer and the chips ultimately are sexy only to EE's and gearheads.