Is Clipping Articles Fair Use? U.S. Court Says No

[steve2470]

http://mashable.com/2013/03/25/fair-use/

The term "fair use" gets thrown around a lot in copyright cases, and it refers to an exception to copyright law that allows for the publication of portions or derivations of a copyrighted work — without the permission of the original creator. On the web, fair use has been used to defend aggregators such as Google News, since they take portions of articles to create a service.

Does that label also apply to a service that does a similar thing, but for a newsletter? A U.S. court recently said it doesn't.

As paidContent describes, a federal court ruled that Meltwater, a Norwegian company that does "news and social media monitoring" was violating copyright with its newsletter service. Meltwater's service scans articles for keywords, then takes the headline, the first paragraph or "lede," and the parts of the story where the keyword appears.

The Associated Press sued Meltwater, saying it was violating the AP's copyright on the articles, and that it needed to purchase a license to serve up its content in this way. Meltwater defended its actions under copyright's fair-use doctrine, saying its newsletter service was doing basically the same thing that Google does every second of every day.

[elleng]

1. Details:

'While on first blush Meltwater's service doesn't appear to be all that different from Google News, it's all in the details.

The law around fair use inherently allows for flexibility, but whether or not a particular complaint amounts to a violation is dependent on four factors: the purpose of the duplicated content, the nature of the copyrighted work, how much of the original was copied, and the effect on the market. >>>

[freshwest]

2. Just so long as it doesn't affect DU, or does it? I don't see the fine points (not-an-attorney).

[elleng]

3. Wouldn't affect DU, as we carefully comply

with requirements, to use only a limited portion and to identify sources.

Copyright is complex, saw an interview recently reaffirming that for me, so I can't elucidate the details. Here's the interview:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/311003-3#

[freshwest]

4. Thanks!

[Warpy]

5. That's weird, clipping services have been used for decades

by people at all levels of government as well as by people in private industries. Those services comb major media for articles in various fields and compile them in daily, weekly or monthly report format. I suppose now they'll have to be done electronically with links and blurbs instead of clipped articles.

This is a bizarre ruling.