The problem, as it’s always been, however, is that there’s a lot of gray area between these organizations’ demands, historically, and the reality of how online news actually works. For example, remember the AP’s attempts to outlaw search engine links? Linking, which last I checked is largely how news aggregation works, is not something a lot of sites are going to be willing to pay to do. Links are kind of what make the web a web.

This collaboration is called NewsRight, and it’s being led by former ABC News President David Westin, who has assumed the CEO role.

The 29 organizations include: the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The McClatchy Company, Hearst Newspapers (see the entire list at the end of this article). Combined, the organizations account for 841 websites representing newspapers accounting for a combined circulation of over 147 million Americans, and 170 million web readers.

“More news is available more ways than ever in history. But if reliable information is to continue to flourish, the companies investing in creating content need efficient ways to license it as broadly as possible,” says Westin. “NewsRight’s mission is to make sure consumers continue to benefit from the all the original news reporting they want while ensuring those who republish content do so with integrity. ”

“Working with NewsRight benefits digital innovators because they can license news content in their applications quickly and easily; news organizations that provide the content for those applications benefit because they can more efficiently license their content to a broader range of uses; and consumers benefit because they will have assured access to a robust supply of credible news and information in new and exciting ways,” he says.

On the licensing front, in short, NewsRight aims to make it easy for third-parties to obtain legal clearance to use content from the participating publishers. By paying, obviously.

The question is, will they pay? Will things really change? I guess we’ll see. Another question is really, who all do they expect to pay? If a site is running their content in its entirety, then yes, payment makes sense. But what about a blog or other news site pulling a quote for a story? What about the same in a Google+ post?

NewsRight reportedly intends to encode its stories with data that will let the organization know where it’s being used, as well as who is reading it. It’s unclear how much of the content has to be used to trigger this.

NewsRight’s initial investors include: Advance Publications, The Associated Press, Axel Springer Group, A.H.Belo Management Services, Belo Management Services, Business Wire, Community Newspaper Holdings, El Dia, Galveston Newspapers, Gatehouse Media, The Gazette Company, Hearst Newspapers, Journal Communications, Landmark Media Enterprises, The McClatchy Company, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris Communications, Morris Multimedia, NPG Newspapers, The New York Times Company, Ogden Newspapers, Pioneer Newspapers, Schurz Communications, The E.W. Scripps Company, Stephens Media, Swift Communications, Times Publishing Co. and The Washington Post Company.

We’ll be following this story in the future. NewsRight deems itself “the right path for news on the web.” Do you agree?

News has now come out that the AP is even going after its own affiliates for…embedding YouTube videos uploaded to the site by the AP itself, embed code and all. Now one might think that when you upload a video to YouTube and leave that embed code enabled, the purpose is for sharing content. After all, that’s the whole point of YouTube as I understand it. Evidently the AP sees YouTube in a different light, or whoever uploads their content is unaware of the ability to disable embedding, a feature that is often used by other content producers (though the reasoning behind this itself is still baffling to some).

Here’s what a YouTube Channel looks like (This is Google Webmaster Central’s). I’d show a screenshot of the AP’s, but wouldn’t want to "misappropriate" it. And I certainly wouldn’t want to "misappropriate" it by linking to it.

"In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness," says Erick Schonfeld.

As the greater Fair Use debate rages on, Hitwise has put together some research looking at how the relationship between news content and those the AP alleges are "misusing" content. "Search engines and news aggregators were all somewhat implicated as those who may be misusing content, so we decided to take a look at their impact upon driving traffic to news websites, which ultimately generate ad revenues," writes Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty. Search drove 22% of traffic to news and media sites in March. Look at the following graphs:

"Although several of the online aggregators are at the heart of the content distribution argument, they do successfully send visits to news properties rather than keeping them upon their own websites," says Dougherty.

Every so often, the AP comes out and brings up their debate again. It’s been going on for years. Will the way it is done change or will the AP and other publishers find that they simply need to adjust to the times? Here’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks.

"We’re always getting asked what people who work at Facebook are up to and how they can find out about it," explains Alex Moskalyuk on the Facebook Blog. "Facebook is focused on helping people share and connect, and in our work, we encounter some pretty big questions and unsolved problems. Often our work follows us home. With so many interesting challenges and perspectives, we want to surface all the thoughts, energy and passion of the people at Facebook."

The page can be found at people.facebook.com, and consists of three channels:

1. Engineering
2.Platform
3.Life

More channels will make their way to the page in the future. "You’ll discover a bit of everything from an engineer’s diatribe on what makes good code to an open letter to the White House on best practices for the President’s website and even an explanation as to how the OpenID experience can work within pop-up windows," says Moskalyuk.

People looking to stay current on Facebook happenings (including those of us who report on them) should fin the page incredibly useful. Of course it includes RSS feeds for the main page as well as each channel.