The AP is spoiling for a fight it can’t win. It started last week when the news organization took exception with the linking and excerpting practices at the Drudge Retort (not the Drudge Report), a liberal social news site run by longtime blogger Rogers Cadenhead. You can see some examples of the posts the AP wanted taken down here, but basically the posts contained nothing unusual: a headline and a fairly short snippet from the actual article. No surprise: the move prompted a major blog-borne blowback.

Following that, AP VP Jim Kennedy told the NYT that it regretted its “heavy-handed” approach to the Drudge Retort and that it would “rethink” its attitude towards bloggers. Ok. But from there the AP’s goals are pretty unclear. Jeff Jarvis characterizes the AP’s back-and-forth stance as a “policy ping-pong game”. Kennedy says they don’t want to sue bloggers, but they’re not withdrawing their take-down demands. He says they don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere but that they want blogs to use short summaries, rather than even short quotations. Basically it comes down to this: the AP doesn’t want blogs to convey the news in the article; it wants readers to go to the article. The next step: developing guidelines for blog linking and summarizing. Apparently it plans to meet with the Media Bloggers Association, but if it thinks that group somehow represents or holds sway over a lot of bloggers, it will be sorely mistaken.

The AP’s ambivalent attitude was clear when I interviewed AP CEO Tom Curley last year. While talking up the web 2.0 ethos of free-floating content, he also balked at what some would consider fair use: “If you want our content, we expect to be paid for it … this nonsense that you can just take the first paragraph or use the picture small doesn’t really fly with us.”

Of course, the AP is in somewhat charted territory here, having been in court with Moreover for awhile, over basically the same thing. But it’s one thing to go after a large, commercial organization (VeriSign), and it’s quite another, strategically, to go after a rather small social news community with a few BlogAds running along the side. The fact that it chose this site of all of them is sending a strong signal. It’s not going to work, of course. It’s probably the ultimate tilting-at-windmills situation. In the meantime, the organization will take considerable hits to its reputation.

Update: The NYT’s Saul Hansell weighs in again, this time wearing his blogging hat: “A number of bloggers I respect a great deal didn’t find the A.P.’s openness to their ideas to be enough and have declared war on it. As someone who is both a blogger and an employee of a mainstream news organization, I worry that this hotheaded response is part of what gives blogs a bad name.” (Be sure to read the comments.)