That’s what Ryan Chittum of The Columbia Law Review found out:

“We want to stop wholesale misappropriation of our content which does occur right now–people who are copying and pasting or taking by RSS feeds dozens or hundreds of our stories.” Seagrave tells me. “Are we going to worry about individuals using our stories here and there? That isn’t our intent. That’s being fueled by people who want to make us look silly. But we’re not silly.”

I’m glad I read this because I was about to blog about the need for a boycott (which I usually never support but in the case I was willing to make an exception). If they AP didn’t get it, maybe we should help them understand how the Internet works by boycotting their stories (there is always AFP and Reuters).
But if this is their position, why do we continually see it reported like this in the NY Times?

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.
[…]
The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

It really does sound like they intend to be paid for links to their stories which is ludicrous.