Comments on: NY judge says running a search engine for news is a copyright violation

By: donovan acree

donovan acree — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:55:00 +0000

And as a result, the people become less informed. Well done courts. Well done.

By: leimodnu

leimodnu — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:20:00 +0000

Not a search engine — its what was called in the old days a clipping service which always paid license fees to the news organizations. Meltwater does not pay this fee. They probably should.

By: RElgin

RElgin — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:46:00 +0000

You are so right about Disney. They have single-handedly undermined copyright in America and have become a notable example of a corrupted dream.

By: Florian Bösch

Florian Bösch — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:35:00 +0000

It doesn’t benefit them. The traditional news services are losing their business, and they don’t know what to do. They work under this weird idea that:

1) Prevent people linking to them
2) …
3) Profit

By: Gilbert Wham

Gilbert Wham — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:48:00 +0000

Whoa. That’s one fucking big ‘maybe’ right there…

By: Pjay (Patti) Pender

Pjay (Patti) Pender — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:33:00 +0000

No, it’s not. It’s obviously fair use. and copyright isn’t a stupid concept, it’s been corrupted over time by some…less than scrupulous corporate entities (I’m looking at you, Disney).

By: Pjay (Patti) Pender

Pjay (Patti) Pender — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:30:00 +0000

How do news organizations benefit if their material is not included in search engines? I already ignore stories I see that link to paywalled news sources and simply search for a source of the information that isn’t going to make me jump through hoops for the story. Do more news sources want to be ignored by the majority of people? I just don’t see how this benefits them.

By: bill_mcgonigle

bill_mcgonigle — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:16:00 +0000

Well, of course it’s a copyright violation. The leeway is whether or not fair use is a valid defense, even for Google.

Maybe enforcing copyright strongly will show people how backwards and stupid it really is.

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:02:00 +0000

It sounds like it’s time for a mechanical paraphrase approach. Sure the resulting excerpts will be stilted, as if the news were written by non-native speakers or functional illiterates, but after a while everyone will think that’s just the way real journalists at AP write.

By: Christian Buggedei

Christian Buggedei — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:46:00 +0000

the worst thing? Germany just actually passed a law stating just this. :(

By: Sagodjur

Sagodjur — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 04:07:00 +0000

This is good news though! This means that my news service search engine that focuses only on excerpting the most useless aspects of news articles should not be challenged by any of the publications from which I get my results.

Also, check out today’s top story: “Mr. Smith could not be reached for comment.”

By: Sagodjur

Sagodjur — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 04:04:00 +0000

The creativity required to craft the lede is why it qualifies for copyright. It also has nothing to do with a fair use analysis.

By: James Agenbroad

James Agenbroad — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 02:26:00 +0000

Or if you wanted to post the facts, you could simply extract them from the newspaper article and express them in your own way. That would certainly be okay. (despite this some corporation might try to sue you anyway, though)

By: jimkirk

jimkirk — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:15:00 +0000

“More important to the fair use analysis is the fact that (1) is primarily factual”

That assumption about “primarily factual” may not be true…

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/11-the-media-can-legally-lie/

By: daveistrad

daveistrad — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:43:00 +0000

The judge in this case, Hon. Denise Cote, is brilliant and very experienced. She is also almost 70 years old, and not someone I believe to be very tech savvy.

By: timquinn

timquinn — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:41:00 +0000

Perhaps newspapers could create a second version of an article that is devoid of any copyrightable essence and is strictly the facts that could be fairly used without infringing. I write this as an absurdly unachievable goal, but it looks now like an argument that might past muster with this judge.

By: James Agenbroad

James Agenbroad — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:22:00 +0000

Certainly Feist made “sweat of the brow,” irrelevant in copyright. But at some level an argument can be made that the amount of effort expended in crafting the lede means that the expression IS more than the sum of it’s facts.

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:51:00 +0000

Google and Yahoo are next? Bing, too?

By: Gloomingdale

Gloomingdale — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:27:00 +0000

Still, much of the ruling seemed like sweat of the brow type arguments being brought up again by AP and I think Meltwater’s use was transformative.

By: chorizo

chorizo — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:27:00 +0000

Would news services prefer if their articles didn’t show up in search results at all? Anything that is just a non-creative statement of fact can’t be copyrighted, even if the news source is the first to publish the fact.

By: Gloomingdale

Gloomingdale — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:25:00 +0000

I think calling Meltwater a “search engine for news” is a bit of a misstatement. Also much of the court’s analysis focused on the fact that much more than “the first sentence or two” were reproduced by Meltwater.