11-Word Extracts May Infringe Copyright In Europe 132
splodus writes "The European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court, has ruled that a service providing 11-word snippets of newspaper articles could be unlawful. Media monitoring company Infopaq International searches newspaper articles and provides clients with a keyword and the five words either side. This practice was challenged by the DDF, a group representing newspaper interests, as infringing their members' copyright. The court has referred the issue back to national courts to determine whether copyright laws in each country will be subject to the ruling. The full ruling is available at the European Court of Justice Web site."
Re:But why would they not want this? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing to do with the "intarweb". They were taking dead-tree newspapers, scanning, OCRing, extracting snippets from the resulting text, and printing them. Actually if this had been entirely electronic the ruling would have been different, because one of the two rulings is that the last step of making a physical print-out is non-transient, and thus one exemption is ruled not to apply.
The other ruling is that an 11 word extract is not automatically incapable of being worthy of copyright protection: (my emphasis)
An act occurring during a data capture process, which consists of storing an extract of a protected work comprising 11 words and printing out that extract, is such as to come within the concept of reproduction in part within the meaning of Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, if the elements thus reproduced are the expression of the intellectual creation of their author; it is for the national court to make this determination.
This isn't entirely unreasonable, because otherwise haiku authors be rather unprotected.
Finally, to answer your original question of why they don't want this: I think it's because the purpose here isn't to create an index for people in general to use but to create a resource for Infopaq's researchers to then write original content summarising the news.