"There are commercial websites, not even bloggers, necessarily," Bridis added, "that take some of our best AP stories, and rewrite them with a word or two here, and say 'the Associated Press has reported, the AP said, the AP said.' That's not fair. We pay our reporters. We set up the bureaus that are very expensive to run, and, you know, if they want to report what the AP is reporting they either need to buy the service or they need to staff their own bureaus."
Bridis did acknowledge the importance of fair use. "Because we do it too, necessarily," the AP news editor conceded. "If the New York Times has a story, we may take an element of it and attribute it to the Times and build a story around it."
If you read the whole thing you can tell they're really just confused. They want more people to pay them money and they looking for rationalizations for it. Have fun RIAAing yourself out of existence...