AP CEO Tom Curley Threatens Google: "They Will Not Get Our Copy Going Forward"

Is there a list of AP sites? So we can make sure we don't use any of their material on our own sites?

Not by means of protest or anything. It's just that fears of bankruptcy are clearly driving the AP nuts and I'd rather not be in the way of any random lawsuits thrown around as a last ditch effort.

What's the bet that if/when Google drops AP content completely AP will start suing them to get put back in to search results.

Message to Tom from the Interweb: "Do not piss off the Goog, your Internet life depends on it".

Seriously, as much as I don't see eye-to-eye with many of Google's decisions and tactics, they own the gateway to the web (currently) and will destroy you if they feel like it.

Now would be a good opportunity for Reuters to come out and side with Google

The bigger question is... When the AP is gone from the Internet, will anyone notice?

The AP is pissed because Reddit, Digg, Google, and others (Hacker News?) are using AP content every day... usually with full attribution and links back to the article. Let me put that another way - some of the most popular sites on the internet send millions of pageviews to the AP every day.

That's a traffic situation that most sites would love to be in - but the AP can't figure out how to make money from those eyeballs? So they're going to try to stop the influx of traffic, so that... what? Their content can wither and die in peace? Talk about cutting yourself out of the equation.

Why do I have a bad feeling that news aggregators will be getting their pants sued off?

Any time they want, they can remove their content from google using a robots.txt.