Cost vs. Benefit In Tracking Down People Using AP Content

The Associated Press (surprise, surprise) is covering that the Associated Press has signed on with some new startup that will help them scour the web to find websites that use AP content without a license. This is presented by the AP as a thing that clearly makes sense for the AP to do... though, that's not necessarily true. Doing this costs money, as well as time and effort (and lawyers) to respond to those who are using the content in an unauthorized manner. Compare that to the benefit of the AP forcing random sites that probably don't get any traffic to take the AP story they copied down. It just doesn't seem worth it. If there's a really big site using their content in an unauthorized manner, it seems likely to come to the AP's attention pretty quickly anyway. The small sites that this type of service will probably turn up aren't really costing the AP anything because they'd never license the AP content in the first place. So, if you look at the cost-benefit, you have to wonder how this could possibly make sense for the AP.