The Associated Press is following up on its threats to go after offending companies that copy or rewrite its stories, or use it “improperly”: first it sues Moreover and its parent company Verisign in October last year, and now it has filed a lawsuit against AHN Media and All Headline News in Manhattan federal court, seeking unspecified damages. According to this Canadian Press story, AHN, based in Wellington, FL, copies AP stories from other websites and redistributes them on its site and sells it to third parties, competing with AP. “AHN has no reporters and is simply a vehicle for copying news reports and misappropriating news gathered and reported by real news services such as AP,” the lawsuit says.

AHN and the AP did a deal in 2003 that gave AHN the right to distribute the first two paragraphs of news stories, the lawsuit said, but AHN started taking full AP stories, stripping them of AP byline. AP ended the contract in 2005 because of these tactics, the suit said.

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