News leech loses appeal on High Court copyright case Commercial news parasite Meltwater has lost an appeal in the High Court against the newspaper industry. The company provided a commercial headline-scraping service to clients in PR and marketing agencies. But a landmark judgment in the High Court last November decreed that it would require a licence, ruling that newspaper story …
Allowing copyright on such small fragments of text is not a good or sensible precedent.
The problem with judges deciding things is judges are all ex-lawyers and as such are biased towards decisions that increase work for lawyers. I'm not convinced - especially in light of my own experience in the High Court as a witness - that any legal decisions should be made without a jury.
That was my initial reaction.
Then I saw: "The Public Relations Consultants Association, formed from Meltwater customers,". While I truly hate the idea of "One law for us..." and fully agree that justice should be blind, in this case it's terribly hard to muster any sympathy at all for the bastards taking the shaft over this.......
And at the same time you claim that you truly hate the idea of "One law for us...".
You'll find that the effectiveness of marketing depends on key words and the best way to figure this out is to look at articles (whether they are PR puff pieces or actual news is irrelevant).
Just because the PRCA took advantage of screen scrapers that automate the ability to research what's being said about their clients by looking at headlines does not make them the bad guys. What I *do* think though is that Meltwater *should* need a license because it is an automated service and it has the capability of skewing click stats on the newspaper sites.
Oh well...
Worth pointing out that Meltwater has never said it wouldn't take a licence.
This whole issue is down to the NLA wanting Metlwater's customers to have to take a licence in addition to the one Meltwater takes. Note: the same applies to all the other monitoring companies.
You are missing the point.
A headline is not a fragment - it is an entire element that is created completely as a single entity.
Further - even if it was a quote frrom a larger element that would still be copyright protected, and rightly so, except for fair use purposes. There is nothing about headline scraping that falls within any definition of fair use (i.e. criticism, comparison, exemplar).
No need to get the vapours about setting precedents as the judgement itself is very narrow in scope and, quite properly, addresses itself to the particular circumstances of the case and makes it clear that it doesn't apply to individuals
The webscrapers in this case were using the outcome of other people's creative processes to gain a commercial benefit to themselves. if the web is ever going to emerge from its own primordial ooze and become something worthwhile then it needs to protect the rights of people who add value and not those who simply leech off of everyone else.
Well I took it that the minium was 58 and the average was 500 with most prices falling between those amounts. No mention of the maximum but it only take a small number of high values to skew an average to the top end of a range.
Possibly one paper wants to discourage this entirely so is charging £20,000 a year ?
Headlines are generally ment to be published so as to attract readers. So I while I see why it's an important tool of the trade, I don't really see why they'd have to have copyright. In this case, that attraction thing still functioned. Why did they protest having their headlines scraped? It would likely have resulted in more article views and associated ad showings. Much like happens when people peruse the RSS feeds that so many newspapers provide free of charge.
It wasn't like this outfit stole the headlines and put them on their own articles, was it? Didn't see the details in the article. Then again the newspapers probably felt that the company making money with their service was making money by showing off the headlines they wrote. Bit of a gut reaction, but anyway. Even five hundred quid per newspaper per year isn't that much for a reseller. But the reasoning is a bit, well, base in its appeal.
If it also applies to companies who've set up their own scraper --something a competent sysadmin does in an afternoon-- for internal use, then they might've just found themselves a nice little earner though I don't think they can fund even a whole extra hack with that revenue stream. Then again, the monies might mean that shops already doing the scraping for internal use might stop doing so entirely --dropping ad revenue-- or see themselves forced to sell the scraping result onward again --possibly increasing ad revenue for the papers again.
So, well, I don't know how it's going to pan out as I haven't the faintest how the cards lie in hacks & headlines land. 'Tis curious though, and looking at the walloon news outfits getting predictably thrown out of google entirely due to a court ruling they asked for themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if this bites them in the backside some way. We'll see, and in any case it's bound to become yet more fodder for the headline writer.
"In our business we need a system to scrape the headlines of news sites relevant to our industry so that we can flag them up to the sales guys as potential sales opportunities."
That's what many businesses need, and what they pay a small amount to get. Even a grand a year is less than a trip for one suit to go to a conference.
What you want is the service, but you don't want to pay for it. OK that's cool - there's nothing to stop you coding up your own site scraper for in-house use with a few lines of code.
If you don't write your own then pay up, monkey boy.
But don't make your laziness and ignorance into a moral right. We've seen right through you.
What the PRCA is objecting to is having to pay Meltwater (for the service) *AND* the NLA for a licence. In effect, a company using Meltwater's services pays the NLA twice, once for their own licence, and once (in effect) for Meltwater's.
If it was a VAT-style system, then all would be fine... i.e. "we have our own licence from NLA, so Meltwater can't charge us for the fraction of the licence they will charge us".
If Meltwater pay for a single licence, then surely they shouldn't be able to share that licensed content outside their company (assuming that's the scope of the the license they bought). What they're selling is their software - as they have no right to sell on other people's content. Either that, or they should pay for a multi-user licence.
In the same way, if I buy a DVD I've paid for the right to watch the film, but I don't have the right to put on a public screening and charge for tickets. However I can do that, if I'm willing to pay the correct license (which costs a lot more).
So I assume all this ruling is really covering is that headlines also come under copyright, even though they're short. Which seems fair enough. They don't happen by magic. Papers pay people (sub-editors) to write the headlines - so it doesn't seem unfair that companies should own the rights to content they've had to pay to create.
I don't see why this should be controversial. If we want good stuff, we've got to have a way pay people to do it. Some people will always produce good stuff for the fun of doing it, and if they're willing to give that away for free, then hooray. However, they should also have the right to charge for it - and then in future they may produce more good stuff, because they can give up their day-job, and just produce good stuff. This is good for society (we get more good stuff), as well as being good for the people and companies who make it.
If as a society we reward production of the things we want, we'll get more of them. If we make it impossible to be rewarded for doing the things we want, then we shouldn't be surprised if we get less.
This post has been deleted by its author
at the details. If headlines are now absolutely copyright protected, then Google need to stop including them in searches too, because Google is just a scraper on steroids. If there's some sort of safe harbor provision for Google, then we no longer have one law for all.
As someone who often wound up having to write headlines (even though I was technically the editorial cartoonist) at my old college paper, I can testify to that. To crush the essence of a story into maybe seven or eight words in one or two lines took a lot more skill than most people think -- I was writing "tweets" a good thirty years before Twitter was invented.
Of course, my headline-writing skills pale in comparison to the headline geniuses at El Reg ("Cops Cuff Man For Burning Burning Man Man"), or the Weekly World News' simple, elegant and gloriously absurd early '80s classic, "WW2 Bomber FOUND ON MOON", or their 1994 masterpiece "JUPITER RADIOS EARTH FOR HELP".
It's also worth noting that this month saw the retirement of one of the New York Post's best-known headline writers, who penned the immortal "Headless Body In Topless Bar".
A tall cold one for the New York Post guy.
Rather than just scraping headlines and sending extra traffic to newspapers for free, you launch a new service with a "special offer".
"With our new tracking service, we can increase the viewing figures of your site. Pay us £99 per year and we will intelligently index your headlines with a short flavour text, driving viewers to your articles and helping you to massively increase ad revenue. Sign up before the end of this year and you get your first year of service ABSOLUTELY FREE!"
There.
(also yes, isn't Google doing the same thing as Meltwater?)
How about book titles? If I put together a list of <someobscurecategory> books, and put it up on my website *with ads!1!!* for fans of <someobscurecategory>, when the publishing houses notice they can say "hey look someone has come up with an inovative new way to make money, let's milk them to death with court cases and outrageous demands for fees". Book titles are hard to come up with, and if someone comes up with a way to make money from them, then that should be turned into less money so that some corporations can get their rightful cut, and then even less money as some oversized fee collecting bureaurocracy is set up and populated with useless hangers on.
When the whole point of headlines / book titles / sound recordings / video recordings in the first place was to entice people into lining up for the full experience, and they still perform that function nicely, but once the smell of money gets in the water the lawyers get into a frenzy and people start getting weird ideas that where headlines were once written for hire and then given away to anyone who would take one now they are some kind of works of art that nobody should be able to experience without paying a fee to a huge parade of middlemen.
The ridiculousness rolls on. Small wonder so many people tune out?
No doubt you are correct that these blagards were stealing your headlines, but you left the explanation of the theft out of your story.
I guess it was obvious to you, but those of us who aren't internet journalists are left wondering how reporting your headlines is theft. Why don't you want people to read you headlines?
Back when my city had afternoon newspapers, the publishers used to make up big headline posters for all outlets, so that people passing could see, for free, what the biggest headline was.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
