From the article...
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 word that's particularly funny to me here is
references. How in the world is one to use AP as a reference as anyone might use any journal, book, or news source? Those particular elements--headline, title, and link if online source--are necessary to APA or AMA style, or just about any written reference style. I create reference lists all the time for specifically commercial use--advertising pharmaceuticals--and it's all 100% fair use and in fact required by any reputable academic standards, too. It's
not giving credit for information that can get you in most trouble! We have to pay for single-use and/or multiple-use due to copyright only when we use reprints or reproduce/adapt figures or tables (and that can usually be gotten around by changing them to some other format, which is not always a good enough option, but sometimes is).
Anyway, I think they're on pretty shaky legal ground on this one. I don't think they can win all the way down to a "link and a headline." Not that they're worth caring about.