Copyright in newspaper headlines and short extracts
The Court of Appeal's decision in NLA v PRCA / Meltwater
The Court of Appeal has given its keenly awaited judgment in the NLA v PRCA/Meltwater case. The Court of Appeal was asked to decide whether the High Court had been right in declaring that members of PRCA (PR agencies) require a licence in order lawfully to receive and/or use the Meltwater news service. The Court of Appeal said the High Court was right - PR agencies (i.e. end users) do require a licence.
Background
The Newspaper Licensing Agency (the NLA) is in the midst of a legal dispute with a news aggregator and monitoring agency, Meltwater. The Public Relations Consultants Association Limited (PRCA), which represents the interests of its UK PR agency members, is supporting Meltwater.
The dispute surrounds Meltwater’s provision of online media monitoring services to its customers (i.e. the PR agencies). Customers select search terms and Meltwater sends them reports of articles containing those search terms. The reports include the headline of an article (which hyperlinks to the article), the opening words of the article and an extract showing the context in which the search term appears (in no more than 256 characters).
The judgment
The Court of Appeal considered three main issues and gave the following answers:
- Are headlines original literary works i.e. protected by copyright? Yes - they are capable of being original literary works.
- Are extracts containing the opening words of an article and a small part of the text surrounding the search term (together, no more than 256 characters) a substantial part of an original literary work i.e. if a copy is taken will there be prima facie infringement? Yes - they can be and the probability of there being infringement by Meltwater's users is "substantial".
- Do any defences apply? No - the end users' activities were not "temporary copies" for the purposes of the s28A CDPA defence and there was no fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review or reporting current events.
Lawyers Niri Shanmuganathan, Adam Rendle
