At first blush, the AP’s description of the program, found in this press release and this FAQ, sounds a lot like an attempt to implement digital rights management–a lock-and-key system–for the news. But at least in this iteration, that’s not the case. The AP is really talking about adding a layer of metadata to its copy, so it can see who’s using it, and where.

“Any time you talk about a tracking system, the thrust of [the commentary] is about enforcing copyright,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s VP of strategic planning, told me this afternoon. “But what we hope is the outcome out of this is the ability to enable more licensed uses of  content. We want to keep the content open, we don’t want to keep it behind firewalls.”

If you want to see a benign description of the technology the AP intends to use, head to this site, developed by its U.K.-based partner Media Standards Trust. If you don’t have time for that, just imagine Wal-Mart (WMT) adding RFID chips to track its pallets as they move around the country.

Jim Kennedy tells me that the AP will have tests for the new system up and running by mid-November, and hopes to have it in place for all the copy it produces by the end of the year. And in 2010, it will make it available to the cooperative’s members, i.e., other news organizations.

You’ll hear griping about this from some corners, but all of it sounds fine to me–I don’t care how the AP tracks its product. But note that this tracking system only works when its used by someone who already has a business relationship with the AP.

Which means it doesn’t solve the two problems the AP started complaining about this spring: The  fact that bloggers and other nogoodniks are using AP copy without paying for it and the fact that Google (GOOG) isn’t paying the AP enough for the copy it does use.

On those fronts, the AP’s contract with Google expires at the end of this year, and my understanding is that renewal negotiations are moving slowly, at best. And the AP will continue to use Attributor’s tracking service to find unauthorized uses of its stuff on the Web.

And if the AP ever does try to shove its copy behind a firewall, then a tracking system would come in handy. But we’re not there yet.

Welcome back to Weekend Update, where we showcase some of the highlights from this site over the past week.

In the umpteenth round of the old media versus new media match, the Associated Press in its annual meeting this week played into the stereotype of the grizzled no-nonsense editor who shakes his fist at the new interweb thing (or was it intertube?) and its feisty friend Google News, who are running amok on his lawn. In addition to trying to “protect news content from misappropriation,” AP board chairman and MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton emphasized that print was the “meat,” while online was merely the “salt and pepper.” Unimpressed, BoomTown thought Singleton was singling out the steak while missing the sizzle.

In response, Google (GOOG), or He Who Was Not Named, posted a polite, if rather ambiguous, statement on its public policy blog, which was just begging for translation. Also doing some interpreting of his own, AP executive Jim Kennedy spoke with MediaMemo on just what all the fire and brimstone was about. In quieter newspaper-related news, The Wall Street Journal continues on its quest to spread pay content online, possibly through niche content, according to WSJ.com Executive Editor Alan Murray. Also experimenting online is the recently opened news Web site, True/Slant, a heady combination of journalism, social networking and advertising.

Another news item that’s gotten people talking is the fallout from the collapsed IBM-Sun merger, aka Sun pulls a Jerry Yang. (Oh Jerry, the Internet kids because it loves… loves to kid! Pwn-age.) Following the news of the collapse, Sun (JAVA) shares dropped more than 27 percent, leading analysts and Digital Daily to predict difficult times ahead for the company, here and later here as the stock continued its fall over the week. Besides quashing its own stock price, Sun also quashed rumors that chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy would replace CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Other nonthematic highlights this week:

BoomTown got the exclusive on the anticipated talks between Yahoo’s (YHOO) Carol Bartz and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Steve Ballmer in which the two CEOs discussed the possibility of a search and advertising partnership. Speaking of exclusivity, Google and Microsoft like totally want to be Twitter’s new bff, or maybe go steady if Twitter’s interested.

Digital Daily ruminated on speculations of Time Warner (TWX) doing an AOL spinoff, especially after its hire of former Google exec Tim Armstrong and its attempts to amend debt agreements as per an SEC filing. Also in the rumor mill: The iPhone 3.0 may support onboard video editing. Less of a rumor and more of a slap in the face, to Apple (AAPL) at least: Elan Microelectronics has taken off the gloves (and taken up the lawsuit) because it believes that Apple’s products infringe on its touchscreen patents.

MediaMemo goes over the facts about Vevo, the new online music video hub that’s a partnership between Google’s YouTube and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, with interesting ramifications for both. Meanwhile, iTunes has put in place its new tiered-pricing system, in which songs will now cost 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. But in a question that shocked no one: Where are the all the lowest-tier songs? Don’t worry your pretty little heads, said Big Music, they’re on their way.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg reports from the battlefield of the growing Smartphone Wars, in which iPhones, BlackBerries and others are engaged in mortal combat. In the Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret reviews BumpTop, an application that takes your flat, plain old X-Y plane of a desktop to the next dimension, that is, the third dimension.

More next week!

Time for some image repair, don’t you think?

The AP is trying to do this at this very moment by distributing an 11-point FAQ that attempts to clarify exactly what it’s thinking. But that document is still a little vague and overly formal. Good thing I got on the phone yesterday with the pleasant Jim Kennedy, who oversees strategic planning for the AP and who speaks in clear, concise English.

Much of what we talked about was a rehash of what we talked about Monday afternoon, when AP Chairman Dean Singleton first riled everyone up with his “mad as hell” speech. But given the rampant confusion of the past few days, I thought it was worth going over again. Some excerpts from our chat:

On the AP’s plans to chase down people who “misappropriate” its content: Kennedy stresses that the news organization isn’t planning on creating a Wall Street Journal-style pay wall around its content. And it’s not concerned about bloggers who link to its stories. His beef is with sites that are reprinting AP’s stories on a regular basis without paying for them. “The activity that we’re trying to limit is the systematic harvesting of news without trying to license it,” he says. “The people who are building a business by taking the content and trying to recreate a news report. That’s what we’re trying to address. We’ve had success doing this.”

On the AP’s plan to promote its work more effectively. This has been construed in some quarters as a plan to create a search engine or news portal. But it’s really just an attempt to upgrade the AP’s search engine optimization strategy–that is, trying to get its stuff to show up higher on Google’s (GOOG) search results. It will do that via “search pages,” or “topic pages,” which are par for the course in the Web world. Check out this New York Times (NYT) page on Somali pirates, or this Huffington Post page on newspapers, and you’ll get an idea of where the AP is going.

If the search page plan works, the pages will be generating plenty of page views when people land on them, and it’s possible that the AP will sell ads on that inventory, Kennedy says. But their real function is to shuttle searchers to the original source material from the AP’s members.

On the AP’s beef with Google: It’s real. But many of the stories published this week conflated the AP’s gripe-essentially, that it’s not getting paid enough by the search engine for the use of its content–with its saber-rattling against aggregators who aren’t paying the AP at all. The AP may indeed end up suing people in the latter group. But it plans on resolving its Google problem with a new contract that will replace the one that expires this year.

Kennedy is vague when it comes to specifics about the Google contract and what he’d like changed: “It’s just a reevaluation of the situation,” he says. But he’s clear that the company intends to keep working with the world’s largest Web site. “When we’re talking about Google, we’re talking about our future business relationship,” he says. “When we’re talking about misappropriation, we’re talking about people who have never contemplated a business relationship with us.”

On the confusing message that the AP presented to the world this week: Guilty as charged, says Kennedy. But he argues that his group has indeed given some thought to what it’s doing, even if it hasn’t communicated that clearly to date. “The future is going to be a lot different than the present and the past on the Internet, and we’re trying to get ready for that process,” he says. “To the untrained eye it looks like we’re stupid. But we’re looking forward to a totally new space where we have to get ready to do things in a totally different way. We’re trying to be smart business people and we’re trying to stay in business.”