In a recent case, the Court of Appeal decided that a PR agency which used a news content aggregation service called Meltwater News was infringing newspapers’ copyright in their headlines. It was also decided that reproducing extracts from articles and hyperlinks may infringe copyright when the person accessing the content from the link does not have a licence.
The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) manages newspapers’ rights and licenses. Their schemes include web database licences and web end-user licences. Meltwater News uses software to collect newspaper content and then it emails, amongst other things, the opening lines and hyper-links of the articles to subscribers. A PR agency, the PRCA, intervened in the case as the NLA informed them that they needed to sign up to its licensing scheme if they wished to continue to use Meltwater’s services.
The Court of Appeal decided that (a) headlines could attract copyright protection and re-production of them could infringe copyright; (b) reproducing hyperlinks and extracts alone could infringe copyright; (c) receiving Meltwater’s services and accessing articles via the hyper-links could both infringe copyright if done without a licence; (d) no defences applied.
The decision is a significant one for publishers. It is relatively surprising that headlines can attract copyright protection. Whilst it is not necessarily the case that all headlines will attract copyright protection, reproduction of them should be carefully considered. The decision that accessing newspaper material online via a hyper-link may be infringing copyright if that access is without the copyright owner’s express permission, for example where a newspaper licence restricts commercial use, is noteworthy; particularly where websites rely on reutilising other sites’ material.
For any further information please contact Callum Galbraith, 0207 355 6033.