Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc.

Last updated

Associated Press v. Meltwater
USDCSDNY.svg
Seal of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Court United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Full case nameThe Associated Press, v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, INC.; Meltwater News U.S., INC.; and Meltwater News U.S. 1, INC.
DecidedMarch 21, 2013
Docket nos. 1:12-cv-01087
DefendantMeltwater U.S. Holdings Inc
ProsecutionAssociated Press
Case history
Subsequent action(s)Meltwater appealed and the case was settled.
Holding
The court held that Meltwater's copying was not protected under the fair use doctrine and it was infringing on AP's copyright.
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting Denise Cote
Keywords
fair use, copyright

Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. March 21, 2013) was a district court case in which the Associated Press (AP) brought suit against Meltwater Group in U.S. (Meltwater) for clipping and sharing news items under copyright infringement and "hot news" misappropriation under New York common law. In a cross-motion for summary judgement, Meltwater argued they were not infringing under the requirements of fair use. Meltwater claimed that their service was transformative and therefore non-infringing on copyright. The court held that Meltwater's copying was not protected under the fair use doctrine and it was infringing on AP's copyright. [1]

Contents

A parallel case filed on the same grounds in the UK, however, was decided the other way in 2013 (in favor of Meltwater and against the equivalent newspaper licensing business) by the UK Supreme Court, subject to questions referred to the European Court of Justice and intended to clarify matters of a cross-border nature.

Background

The Associated Press (AP) was founded in 1846 as a not-for-profit news organization that published original content and photographs. The company received its funds from various subscribing newspaper and broadcasting companies. Licensing fees accounted for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for the Associated Press, and each contract was crafted to grant specific permissions of redistribution, clipping, etc. to each license holder. Each article was carefully sourced, researched, and edited. In addition, each article contained a lede, a concise concentration of key information, which "takes significant journalistic skill to craft." [1] The Associated Press obtained a registered copyright on some of their articles, thirty-three of which were identified to be relevant to this case (Registered Articles). In addition to licensing, AP offered numerous products including "AP Exchange," which allowed licensees to access content by searching for keywords and other metadata. [2]

Meltwater was a "software as a service" or SaaS company, that in 2005 began offering news monitoring services to subscribers. [1] Meltwater electronically clipped articles and their contents verbatim using crawlers for its customers and distributes them widely. [3] The service eventually began to include stories written by AP. Meltwater's "Global Media Monitoring" product allowed its customers to search news articles by keyword. When a customer searched for information based on a string of keywords in the database, Meltwater reported back a list of articles from all over the web organized according to that query. Beneath the search result was a set of information including the headline of the article and URL, the information about the source and origin, and excerpts from that article. Subscribers to Meltwater were able to subscribe to a newsletter for their queries, searched ad hoc and archived the material if desired, etc. [1]

AP and Meltwater competed for the news clipping service market for their clients through AP Exchange and Global Media Monitoring. It was not contested that through the Global Media Monitoring service, Meltwater copied content from each of the thirty-three articles registered under copyright by AP. [1]

Case

History

AP filed suit on 14 February 2012 on six forms of copyright infringement and hot news misappropriation, and Meltwater responded with four defense claims surrounding fair use and tortious interference with business relations. The pretrial was held 20 April 2012 and the right to initial investigation was granted. On 13 July 2012, AP added more articles to their complaint. On 9 November 2012, AP and Meltwater both filed for summary judgment, and the final motions were submitted 23 January 2013. The court decided on 21 March 2013. [1]

Claims

AP asserted to the court that it held a valid copyright and Meltwater made use of the registered articles. Meltwater insisted that its use was fair. While there was no conversation or transacting with AP over Meltwater's use of their material, Meltwater claimed that their software service acted like a search engine, creating the justification for an implied license. Meltwater also accused AP of estoppel because they took insufficient measures to prevent Meltwater from proceeding with their text scraping business. [1]

Decision

The court first established that the Associated Press owned a valid copyright for the articles in question and that Meltwater copied original elements of the articles. [1] Although federal copyright law does not cover the reporting of facts, the compilation of facts is protected (due to precedent set forth by Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. v. Comline Business Data, Inc.). Therefore, the Associated Press owned a valid copyright over its news articles. Furthermore, Meltwater did not deny that it used automated crawlers to scrape the Associated Press's articles for its news aggregation services and programs.

The opinion of the District Judge, Denise Cote, stated that Meltwater did violate AP's copyright by clipping and redistributing its articles without the appropriate licenses. [1] [4]

The court found that Meltwater failed to justify its fair use claim under 17 U.S.C.   § 107. Under 17 U.S.C.   § 107, Meltwater failed to satisfy the four criteria for a fair use defense: [1]

  1. "The purpose and character of the use." The court determined that the purpose and character of use was not substantially transformative. Meltwater argued that its product was providing search functionality to discover the AP's Registered Articles. However, after examination of Meltwater's click through rates to AP's Registered Articles, the court determined that Meltwater's product serviced as a substitute for accessing the AP's articles rather than for discovery. Furthermore, the court made the distinction that, unlike public search engines, Meltwater's search service was a commercial product closed off to paid subscribers.
  2. "The nature of the copyrighted work." The nature of AP's news articles were more expressive than creative. Hence, the court leaned in favor of fair use for this criterion only.
  3. "The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole." Meltwater copied 4.5% - 60% per Registered Article, including the lede which summarizes the article. Meltwater failed to show that it copied this data for the functionality of its search engine.
  4. "The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." The court determined that the effect on the market was substantial. The AP sold licenses to many companies, which allowed those companies to access its articles. However, by bypassing payment for the license in an established market, Meltwater had cheapened "the value of the AP's work by competing with companies that do pay a licensing fee to use AP content in the way that Meltwater does."

The court also held that while other news services who delivered AP's stories licensed from AP, Meltwater did not license the content from the AP. Then, according to the court's holding, Meltwater did not have the right to an implied license as they claimed in court. For one, AP made licensing their articles their main point of cash flow, so to grant a license to a non-paying party did not fall under AP's business model. [1]

Settlement

Although Meltwater had vowed to appeal, both the Associated Press and Meltwater dismissed all claims and counterclaims in July 2013. After the litigation, the Associated Press and Meltwater partnered to develop new products whose aim would be to benefit both companies. [3] [4]

Significance

Associated Press v. Meltwater has provided legal solutions for the news industry to maintain their ability to license to news aggregators. [5] The news industry has claimed to have lost much revenue due to news aggregators that circumvent licensing fees. These news aggregators prevent a significant portion of the news industry's audience from viewing ads on the original content. However, other critics contest that the fair use defense could still be applied to news articles under different circumstances. [6] These other critics suggest that some news aggregators could provide a different function and promote public dialogue amongst news readers.

Parallel UK Meltwater case

Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) v The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) was a 2011 case UK Supreme Court case decided in 2013, [7] essentially on the same issue (Meltwater's media clippings shown to clients online) and with the same defendant, Meltwater Group. The plaintiff differed, being a UK copyright collection society rather than AP, but upon parallel grounds. The case was decided by UK and European law rather than the fair use doctrine, as the latter is only a US legal principle.

The UK case, initially decided by lower courts in favour of the NLA at the initial case and appeal, was overturned by the UK Supreme Court, who ruled Meltwater's activities legal, subject to certain questions referred to the European Court of Justice and intended to clarify matters of a cross-border nature. The rationale was that viewing of copyright works was not, and had never been, illegal in either the UK or European law, [7] : item 36  and Article 5.1 of the European Directive Directive 2001/29/EC (which covers "temporary copies" [7] : item 9, 11 ) permitted automated copying of a temporary nature for a lawful purpose. As mere viewing by Meltwater's clients was lawful under UK and EU law, the technical creation of cached copies to enable and facilitate this were also lawful. [7] : item 16–17 

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fair use</span> Concept in copyright law

Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works by allowing as a defense to copyright infringement claims certain limited uses that might otherwise be considered infringement. The US "fair use doctrine" is generally broader than the "fair dealing" rights known in most countries that inherited English Common Law. The fair use right is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works. In the U.S., fair use right/exception is based on a flexible proportionality test, that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google News</span> News aggregator website and app

Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.

Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software. This article primarily focuses on topics particular to software.

A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include documentation, content, analysis, or editorial opinion, specifically or widely. These services tend to specialize their coverage by subject, industry, size, geography, publication, journalist, or editor. The printed sources, which could be readily monitored, greatly expanded with the advent of telegraphy and submarine cables in the mid- to late-19th century; the various types of media now available proliferated in the 20th century, with the development of radio, television, the photocopier and the World Wide Web. Though media monitoring is generally used for capturing content or editorial opinion, it also may be used to capture advertising content.

Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988</span> United Kingdom law

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, also known as the CDPA, is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that received royal assent on 15 November 1988. It reformulates almost completely the statutory basis of copyright law in the United Kingdom, which had, until then, been governed by the Copyright Act 1956 (c. 74). It also creates an unregistered design right, and contains a number of modifications to the law of the United Kingdom on Registered Designs and patents.

NLA media access is the collecting society for UK newspapers, a privately owned limited company. It undertakes collective rights management on behalf of its members and licenses companies, such as press cuttings agencies and media monitoring firms.

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, program files, documents or electronic books/magazines. It involves various legal aspects as it is often used to exchange data that is copyrighted or licensed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trademark</span> Trade identifier of products or services

A trademark is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies a product or service from a particular source and distinguishes it from others. A trademark owner can be an individual, business organization, or any legal entity. A trademark may be located on a package, a label, a voucher, or on the product itself. Trademarks used to identify services are sometimes called service marks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fair dealing</span> Limitation and exception to a right granted by copyright law

Fair dealing is a limitation and exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. Fair dealing is found in many of the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth of Nations.

The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1929, are in the public domain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright infringement</span> Illegal usage of copyrighted works

Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works. The copyright holder is typically the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement.

In copyright law, the legal status of hyperlinking and that of framing concern how courts address two different but related Web technologies. In large part, the legal issues concern use of these technologies to create or facilitate public access to proprietary media content — such as portions of commercial websites. When hyperlinking and framing have the effect of distributing, and creating routes for the distribution of content (information) that does not come from the proprietors of the Web pages affected by these practices, the proprietors often seek the aid of courts to suppress the conduct, particularly when the effect of the conduct is to disrupt or circumvent the proprietors' mechanisms for receiving financial compensation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Millennium Copyright Act</span> United States copyright law

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">All Headline News</span>

All Headline News (AHN) was a United States-based news agency or wire service. It was founded in 2000 by W. Jeffrey Brown as an internet news search engine. It grew to become a major worldwide online newswire service, providing news and other content, to websites, digital signage, and other publishers who paid a fee for the service.

Meltwater is a globally leading software as a service (SaaS) solution that offers a suite of solutions spanning media, social and consumer intelligence. Their unique technology analyzes ~1 billion pieces of media and social content each day and transforms them into strategic business insights. Meltwater currently has over 27,000 global customers, 50 offices across six continents and 2,300 employees. Meltwater has also gained recognition as a Top 50 Marketing Product and Top 100 Global Software Company.

National Basketball Association v. Motorola, 105 F.3d 841 is a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit case in which the National Basketball Association (NBA) purported that Motorola and STATS infringed the NBA's copyright on the broadcast of games and misappropriated the data presented on the SportsTrax pager.

<i>Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v Bell Canada</i> Supreme Court of Canada case

Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) v. Bell Canada, 2012 SCC 36, is a leading Canadian case on the application of fair dealing under s. 29 of the Copyright Act. It pertained to the use of previews of musical works on online music services that sell digital files of musical works.

Fox Broadcasting Co. v. Dish Network, LLC is a copyright case in which the United States District Court for the Central District of California, by granting partial summary judgment, denied most parts of the copyright claims presented by Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox) against Dish Network (Dish) for its service, a DVR-like device that allowed users to record programming that could be accessed later through any Internet-connected device. The service offered by Dish also allowed users to record any or all Fox's prime-time programs and to automatically skips commercials (AutoHop).

Public Relations Consultants Association v The Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd was a 2011 case UK Supreme Court case decided in 2013.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc., No.1:12-cv-01087 , 156( S.D.N.Y. Mar. 21, 2013).
  2. ↑ "The Associated Press" . Retrieved October 27, 2013.
  3. 1 2 "AP, Meltwater settle copyright dispute" (Press release). New York, NY.: The Associated Press. July 29, 2013. Retrieved October 28, 2013.
  4. 1 2 Vaughan, Bernard. "AP, news aggregator Meltwater end copyright dispute". Archived from the original on November 13, 2013. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  5. ↑ 23 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 1441 (2012-2013) Shutting Down the Turbine: How the News Industry and News Aggregators can Coexist in a Post-Barclays v. theflyonthewall.com World, Marimon, Nicole p.1481-1494
  6. ↑ 122 Yale L. J. 837 (2012-2013) Copyright Protection in an Opt-Out World: Implied License Doctrine and News Aggregators, Jasiewicz, Monika Isia p.840-845
  7. 1 2 3 4 "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 8, 2016. Retrieved April 8, 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.