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The Associated Press has racked up a dismaying series of missteps lately. They threatened an A.P. member for embedding an A.P. YouTube video on its website. Then they go on record (repeatedly) saying that they don't want Google (or anyone else) including A.P. stories in search results.

In short, the A.P. is extremely annoyed by Google's habit of driving traffic to their members' web sites.

Here's the quote that plumbs the depths of their misunderstanding of the online ecosystem. A.P. CEO Tom Curley told the New York Times:

"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

That quote is glib, but mostly wrong. Google didn't build a business just on selling keywords. They made those keywords valuable by matching them with relevant content. Building that business required massive innovation in search techology, IT infrastructure, and business models. The value Google adds to the equasion is emphatically non-trivial. And Google does repay the A.P. by driving traffic to their news items. And the A.P. knows this:

News organizations already have the ability to prevent their work from turning up in search engines - but doing so would shrink their Web audience, and with it, their advertising revenues. What The A.P. seeks is not that articles should appear less often in search results, but that such use would become a new source of revenue.

They recognize the value of the traffic, and still think they're not getting enough. Nevermind that being excluded from search results is a one-way ticket to obscurity.

But the best part is that the A.P. want to enclose their articles in a "digital wrapper" that would magically:

Each article - and, in the future, each picture and video - would go out with what The A.P. called a digital "wrapper," data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

They're talking about DRM that can be enforced on everyone's browsers, and well... that's not possible. And not the "we haven't figured out how" kind of impossible. The "1 + 1 = 3" kind.

(Update: See also Ed Felten's comments on the A.P.'s "wrapper".)

So, in a nutshell, the A.P. is pissed off that Google is making money off sending them readers, and has devised an imaginary techology to make them stop.

Yeah. Good luck with that. I'm headed back over to Bloglines, where I can read really smart commentary and have my news filtered by real people with interests like mine. For free.