AP wins big: Why a court said clipping content is not fair use
A federal court has sided with the Associated Press and the New York Times in a closely-watched case involving a company that scraped news content from the internet without paying for it. — The case has important implications …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Associated Press had already taken a harder public line on fair-use questions in its 2009 rights-system dispute, while an earlier AP-Drudge matter had left the boundaries of online copying unresolved. A 2011 appeals loss over online story copying added a judicial signal that reproducing news content could carry real liability.
The court's siding with AP and The New York Times gives those publishers a more concrete legal basis for distinguishing licensed distribution from commercial clipping built on copied articles.
First-order effects
- AP and The New York Times gain leverage to demand payment from services that reproduce their reporting as news clips rather than merely direct readers to the original work.
- Companies operating unlicensed clipping products face a ruling that rejects fair use as a defense for the copying at issue.
Second-order effects
- Media-monitoring vendors will face pressure to license publisher content or redesign products around links and more limited excerpts, raising the value of publisher-controlled access.
- Other news publishers can point to the decision in negotiations with aggregators and monitoring services, strengthening collective resistance to uncompensated reuse.
Third-order effects
- If courts continue to treat commercial clipping as copyright infringement, online news distribution is likely to divide more sharply between licensed syndication and products that only refer traffic back to publishers.
- The case advances a broader struggle over whether the web's information intermediaries can monetize copied reporting without sharing revenue with the organizations that produce it.
The trend: News publishers are testing copyright law as a way to convert digital reuse of reporting into licensed distribution revenue.