Associated Press Announces New Business Model

I am not familiar with the news website The Associated Press, content or quality otherwise, but methinks this is a bad business model. Stating that people should pay for merely linking to your content is dubious enough, but stating that you plan on planting spyware on your consumers' computer seems like an awfully bad idea:

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web. [New York Times]

Are they purposely trying to commit suicide? It makes one wonder how they even got to where they are at now.