The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributive members of the cooperative.

It’s a business and it DOES charge money to organizations that use it’s resources. While the internet has enjoyed the free usage of AP material up until now, I guess I can understand why they want to be paid for their material if the user hopes to profit from having it on their website.