A recent UK High Court decision has ruled that users of online news monitoring services may be breaching copyright if they do not have a licence from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (“NLA”).

Meltwater News provides a news monitoring service to subscribers in the form of an email containing headlines from articles on newspaper websites along with an extract from the article and a link to the full article. Meltwater monitors a large number of news websites and use a special ‘spider’ program to create an index of words appearing in articles, which they use to generate their email reports based on keywords selected by the users.

The judge reached a number of interesting conclusions which are of interest to publishers, news aggregators and users of news aggregator websites.

• End Users may require a licence: The court ruled that the receipt of a report by email, or accessing the report on an aggregator’s website could constitute copyright infringement.  As such, end users would be required to buy a web end user licence from the Newspaper Licensing Authority (“NLA”)
• Headlines can attract copyright protection: Ms Justice Proudman also ruled that a newspaper headline could, in itself, attract copyright protection. Originality rather than substantiality is the test to be applied in such circumstances. Therefore, where a headline has been independently created with skill and labour it would attract copyright protection

This position is at odds with the law in Australia and the US which have decided that headlines and short phrases could not qualify for copyright protection. It remains to be seen if this position will be adopted in Ireland, however the judge made substantial reference to a recent European Court of Justice decision and, as such, it seems likely that an Irish court faced with this query would find the argument persuasive.

Meltwater News has indicated that it will appeal the decision and the outcome will have a significant effect on the manner in which news monitoring services such as Meltwater operate. The decision is not binding on Irish courts, however as there is an equivalent newspaper licensing body in Ireland it is quite possible that this issue will be explored in this country in the near future. Pending a definitive answer from the courts on this issue, users of news aggregating websites should review the terms and conditions of their subscriptions and ensure that a suitable licence is put in place so that they are not exposed to any potential infringement claims.

Contributed by Leo Moore.