Well, they started with Drudge [my bad, it's a parody site called Drudge Retort]. It seems that they object to his brief, 50-100 word, teases quoted from their stories.

And they say:

All requests for republication of AP material must be in writing, clearly stating the purpose and manner in which the material will be used. All republished material must carry AP credit. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all permission is given for one-time use only. No political candidate, political party, political action committee, polemical organization, or any group formed for partisan purpose may use AP copy in any publication. There may be a fee for reprint use.

There is something in copyright law called “fair use”.

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

the nature of the copyrighted work;

amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

In practice, quoting a small portion of a news story, with a link to the full story is the common and generally accepted blogging practice.

AP has a problem. Various media sources have advanced claims that AP routinely publishes as its own work material that it has taken from existing, copyrighted sources within the media.

The blogger called Patterico, an assistant DA in Los Angeles, has found that they used content from his blog, clearly copyright protected and the product of his own reporting efforts. In his post, he reports on several bloggers who are billing AP for copyrighted material they believe AP stole from them.