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."
TFA just did (Score:2, Insightful)
Europe's highest court held that the 11-word extracts were indeed "reproduction in part" under intellectual property laws. The court described transient acts as being "created and deleted automatically and without human intervention," such as those allowing for database browsing and caching. Such acts must also be incidental, the court said.
They didn't say it had to be continuous...
But why would they not want this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love to be plagiarized like this... (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't understand how Newspapers would not want the traffic that a link would generate. There is nothing more than I would love to have than a thousand sites with 11 word snippets of my articles linking back to me.
Seems foolish.
Re:I'd love to be plagiarized like this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd love to be plagiarized like this... (Score:4, Insightful)
that's just it, most of them want that traffic, but they also want to be paid for the privilege of having a link to the article. it's just them being greedy.
Me thinks they need to learn that the internet is pretty unforgiving when it comes to shoddy content.
In the USA it would be a case-by-case basis. (Score:1, Insightful)
By far most articles would fail under "fair use" but if the 11 words happened to include the a majority of a very small article, there could be problems.
There is also another risk: If the newspaper article quoted someone else, and that quote was lifted without the surrounding text, the 11-word snippet may not be fair use of the original quote.
Here's a contrived example:
I'm a humorist. I make up 1-line zingers for fortune cookies and filler material for community newspapers.
I become famous and a major newspaper does a story on me and prints one of my giggles as an example. Fair use. This search engine comes along and returns the one-liner with a word or two on either side. Sorry, that's not fair use of my original work. Maybe it should be, but in America, it's not.
Yes, that example is contrived but it is possible.
Aftermarket lights⦠(Score:5, Insightful)
The BMW thing does make sense. The time used in replacing your burned out bulb is paid for by BMW on the original lights. It is a light that BMW has confidence in and they know the reliability of the bulbs and thus can reliably predict a cost to themselves. The aftermarket stuff is not approved by them, they know nothing about it, its problems, the cost of the bulbs, or life expectancy. They will not pay for it because they cannot reliably determine what their liability will be.
This is similar to web developers who will guarantee their work and/or provide some sort of fixed fee structure to maintain a site that they build provided the code is only modified by them and no others. Once another developer starts altering code, their confidence on what is going on drops dramatically and they can no longer reliably predict what their time liability will be and thus their own cost to work on the code. They'll then switch to an hourly charge to fix/maintain the code. Makes sense to me.
Re:I wonder how far you could take this (Score:5, Insightful)
what about quoting someone? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the newspapers can claim that an 11 word phrase is copyrighted, then a person should be able to claim that a statement is copyrighted,
and the newspapers would be prevented from making direct quotes.
--- a future newspaper article --- ...
With these events, we should be reminded of the words of John F. Kennedy: (paraphase*) "[Do not ask what services your government can provide for you. Instead ask your government how you can help.]".
* The original quote is owned by the Kennedy family,