Our sister blog FishbowlNY has the details:

The board of directors of the Associated Press has instructed the news wire to develop a registry that will tag and track all AP content online in order to make sure it's not being plagiarized or misused.

"The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used," the AP said.

"What we are building here is a way for good journalism to survive and thrive," Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Directors, said in a statement. "The AP news registry will allow our industry to protect its content online, and will assure that we can continue to provide original, independent and authoritative journalism at a time when the world needs it more than ever."

Although the system will originally only affect the AP's text content, it will eventually extend to member content early next year and to photos and videos after that.