Associated Press and Civil Blockchain Journalism Project Team Up in New Deal

AP Makes a Deal With Blockchain Media Startup Civil

The Associated Press (AP) has recently secured a partnership with the blockchain startup Civil to license articles. Civil Media Company is planning to use AP’s content in many of its newsrooms as part of the deal. Another part of it is that AP and Civil will start to collaborate to track Civil’s original content and use a more effective way to license it with the blockchain technology.

The founder and CEO of Civil, Matthew Iles, told the media that this partnership would be important to ensure that content creators could receive credit for their content both by having their names on their work and being fairly compensated monetarily.

According to the number of the company, about 50 to 70 percent of all content is republished without compensation or attribution to the original authors of the content, which causes serious plagiarism problems.

The AP senior vice president of strategy and enterprise development tends to agree with Civil’s CEO, saying that it is very hard to track content on the internet and how people consume it. According to him, there is a huge difference between licensing content to the internet and to a single company. Contracts are easy to follow, the internet is not.

Because of this, initiatives like this one are important to prevent people from using the content for free without giving any kind of credit for the authors. He is also concerned that people are even using news articles to spread misinformation and fake news.

According to him, this presents both companies with an opportunity to have a real track record on what organizations and people are allowed to publish content online or not. An AP spokesperson has told that the company is happy to collaborate and make AP content available to all newsrooms and supporting good journalism.