Copyright Fair Use Defense Not Available To Aggregator Of AP News Clips

A U.S. federal court has held that the publication by a media monitoring service of excerpts from Associated Press news articles is copyright infringement for which the fair use defense is not available. The Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc. et al., 12 Civ. 1087 (March 21, 2013). The case provides a victory for content owners in the ongoing legal war between creators and distributors of online content.

In granting summary judgment to The Associated Press ("AP") on copyright infringement claims against the media monitoring service Meltwater News ("Meltwater"), a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found that "Meltwater's business model relies on the systematic copying of protected expression and the sale of collections of those copies in reports that compete directly with the copyright owner".

Meltwater offers an online media monitoring service that provides reports to its clients of news articles published on selected topics, based on keywords selected by the client. Meltwater's service uses algorithms to scrape content from the Internet and then deliver a digest of relevant news excerpts to its clients.

As is well known, AP is a news-gathering organization that writes and distributes many news articles each day. AP is owned by a group of more than 1,400 newspapers across the United States, and its articles regularly appear in those newspapers. In addition to licensing articles to newspapers and magazines, AP also licenses digital versions of its content. Significantly, AP also has licensing agreements that permit the distribution of excerpts of its articles; some of Meltwater's competitors had entered into such licensing agreements with AP.

AP sued Meltwater for copyright infringement based on Meltwater's publication of excerpts from thirty-three AP articles in reports delivered to Meltwater clients. According to the court's opinion, Meltwater's reports always published the headline and the lead paragraph of the AP article and also some additional material, representing between 5% and 60% of each AP article. Meltwater relied primarily on the fair use defense, although it also argued additional defenses of implied license, estoppel, laches and copyright misuse. Meltwater's essential argument was that its publication of AP excerpts was transformative and therefore fair because it operated as an Internet search engine that provided limited amounts of copyrighted material in response to its...