11-Word Extracts May Infringe Copyright In Europe

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?

[nagnamer]

if the elements thus reproduced are the expression of the intellectual creation of their author

"I love you too, Honey Bunny!"

How many of you said Pulp Fiction when they saw it? And it's just 6 words.

How about "Luke, I'm your father"?

Copyright is Evil

[whisper_jeff]

I'm fed up. Copyright is evil. I'm a graphic designer who's worked as a writer and an editor so, needless to say, a great deal of my living is made on works protected by copyright but enough is enough. It's a joke. The original intent of copyrights has been so grossly perverted and abused that they're simply evil now. They no longer protect those they were intended to protect and they are abused by those who have absolutely nothing to do with the actual creative works. They're evil.

Pulling stories from the memory hole

[HTH NE1]

Years ago, there was a current story (same day) that was indexed by Google but which the originating site had pulled from the web. Google wouldn't provide a copy of their cache for it and only give me a short snippet in the search results.

So I took two or three words at the start of the snippet, turned them into a quoted phrase, and did a "site:" search of them and the headline. That got me a few more words. Same for words at the end of the snippet. Pretty soon I had the entire paragraph.

However, Google wouldn't give preceding or following words past the paragraph mark, so I had to guess at unique words that would be in other paragraphs, and no clues as to the order of the paragraphs. I do believe I managed to retrieve the entire story in this manner without providing a hit for the originating site, but then, they apparently didn't want the traffic since they'd pulled the story from the site.

Re:Aftermarket lightsâ¦

[Obfuscant]

The worst that would happen is the lightbulb burns out sooner (it's a lightbulb).

You have no imagination.

The worst that could happen is that the light shorts out, is improperly fused, and the wiring starts an engine fire that destroys the car. Or the light itself draws too much current, overheats and melts the reflector/housing, starting an engine fire. (You say it is a halogen bulb, which DOES run a lot hotter than normal tungsten bulbs.)

Or it simply creates a large amount of smoke, distracting the driver who abandons the car in the middle of the motorway causing a multi-car pileup.

BMW is quite right not to pay for installing third-party hardware on their vehicles. They have no way of judging the risks from cheaply-made crap that people ask to have installed. Even for something as simple as a halogen light bulb, many of which have caused house fires in cheap accent lights.

Re:"Fair use" is an American concept

[maxwell demon]

I'm pretty sure those combinations appear en masse in out-of-copyright texts. Also note that copyright works differently from patents in that I'm only infringing if I actually copy from you, not if I accidently write the same text. While it's very unlikely that I would e.g. write the exact wording of your complete post by myself (so if I wrote that text it would be strong evidence that I copied it from you), in general you'd be hard pressed to convince someone that a random use of those two-word phrases were copied from your copyrighted text, rather than either copied from elsewhere or created independently.