Not surprisingly, the announcement has created a massive backlash across the blogosphere, with writers calling the move the AP's "last stance" and branding the organization as a modern-day "bad cop." Those sentiments may well be true. But we don't really know enough details yet to say for sure.

To be clear, I've been the first to in the past when the company has announced asinine plans such as for quoting published material. made the AP look antiquated and idiotic. In the Internet era, you'd hope one of the world's top news-gathering organizations would learn to adapt and embrace modern culture for its benefit rather than try in vain to fight it.

In this instance, though, I'm not sure that the AP is doing the same thing. While suggested the new plan might target blogs or aggregation services for simply featuring small snippets of stories, it's not clear that that's actually the case.

Google and the AP

Just today, Google posted to the AP's announcement in which it stated that the plan didn't "appear to pertain to Google." The articles hosted in-full on Google News are published via a , the company says, while the small excerpts and links in search results are protected under the U.S. Copyright Act's .