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."
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.
Perhaps eventually quoting the law that makes quoting things illegal will be illegal. Why not, wells fargo is suing wells fargo and AT&T charging a discount fee for discounts it would make perfect sense.
Wells Fargo sueing itself (for default loans) is required to properly acquire payment. It is not like they are going to contest it and sit in court aruging with each other. Yes it's silly, but it is the fault of how the law was written not the fault of Wells Fargo. I am sure Wells Fargo rolled their eyes and said "come on, this is stupid, it's our company trying to write-off the debt to OUR company".
Almost as bad when BMW told me that if I wanted replace my burnt-out bulbs under warranty it would be f
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.
In a car the dealership is not owned by BMW. Their service department is reimbursed by BMW USA to perform the service, parts and labor. The parent poster wanted to put in a different bulb he would pay for, reducing BMW's immediate cost and future liability (they obviously wouldn't be on the hook to replace it the next time around).
My suspicion is that it was about bureaucracy. The dealership can't be reimbursed for the labor without adding the part, and if they didn't install a part they billed BMW for i
Mostly agreedâ"at least to the workings. However, I would not attribute this to bureaucracy, but rather to finance. I don't think anyone wants to be financially liable for anything that they cannot control the cost on.
Let's try a computer analogy here. This is kinda' like having an iPod or MacBook with non-replaceable battery. It actually is replaceable but is PitA to do so and Apple says it should be performed by warranty type shop. And if you bought an aftermarket battery, with longer life, yeah, Apple probably wouldn't do that under warranty either.
Except the battery affects the other systems where a lightbulb is affected by other systems. You need to find an analogy with a less integrated part that has no dependencies. Maybe the laptop external fans you can buy (you know the ones you sit underneath your laptop to make it cooler and it connects by a USB). That's about as close as I can think.
I totally understand warranties, and 3rd party products, etc...but there gets to be a point of the spirit of the rule and what it was intended to handle.
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 dri
If you're talking about those hideous ultra-bright blindness beams that assholes have been putting on their cars lately, refusing to install them is in everyone's best interest.
If you're talking about those hideous ultra-bright blindness beams that assholes have been putting on their cars lately, refusing to install them is in everyone's best interest.
The lights were to replace the yellow daytime running lights with white DRLs. At night I have xenons. So nope, but thanks for trying.
BTW those "ultra-bright blindness beams..." are not really ultra-bright, they are normal lights (typically with a light blue "paint" on the bulb). People who do installs either forget to adjust the height of the lights or purposefully set them high. So instead of the light hitting the back of the car in front of them (at license plate level or lower) it hits the rear vie
Wells Fargo sueing itself (for default loans) is required to properly acquire payment. It is not like they are going to contest it and sit in court aruging with each other.
Wells Fargo has already contested their own lawsuit. From the summary [slashdot.org]: "Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied."
Apparently, the news clipping service would have been fine if it had just emailed the eleven word clippings, published them on the web, and/or published them on paper that's designed to self-destruct itself. Their point seems to be that copyright doesn't seem to apply when text is "transient".
The ruling doesn't specifically mention the workarounds of using invisible ink, writing things on your hand, using a etch-a-sketch, and/or making temporary snow angels, but those "transient" writing techniques certainl
So a company searches the intarweb for news stories and displays a snippit (11 words) of this on their site with a link to the newspaper (driving up their readership). This is free advertisement for newspapers, and as they should know free advertisement is almost as awesome as free beer!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's the search engines who are being greedy. The search engines' content is all the sites they index. The search engines want to get that content for free, and only the few indexed sites at the top of the list get anything in return for producing that content. To make matters worse, that top few often has to pay to be there, so the search engines offer nothing in return for their free content.
I don't think the newspapers have a problem with showing up in search results. I think their problem is eve
You misunderstand. It is not that they want to block their articles and summaries from being carried and indexed, hence darwining themselves out of business, such as the Belgium publishers who refuse to use robots.txt to block Google demonstrate. Ultimately they both actually want their stuff to be indexed and carried, even if becomes necessary to find ways to force others to carry their links and summarizes, while at the same time they want to force those they hope they can force to carry their stuff to
people go to search engines to search for something specific rather than general idle reading, that's a different type of reader (and one that isn't as valuable).
They still go to the website if they get the headlines and links from a third party but they don't go via the homepage. They'll get far fewer page views from someone who gets a list of their stories on a third party site than if they go to their front page to do so.
The counter to that argument is that (just throwing out a random website) for all the people who use various content aggregators to get NYtimes articles instead of going through the NYtimes homepage, there are probably just as many people who have no particular interested in the NYtimes, but get sent to random NYtimes articles by various content aggregators. Does that make sense?
I'm not searching reddit for NYtimes articles in lieu of going to the NYtimes homepage. If a reddit link sends me there, then that
The problem is that the people would NEVER want to visist their crappy site every day.
If they did, they neever would have gone to the central site in the first place. They would have found the original article when they logged in.
I go to google for news not "http://abcnews.go.com" because I find that google's automated search is a FAR FAR BETTER service than abcnews.
At heart, what is going on is company A is saying "Company B is better than my company. Make them pay me or go out of business so I can su
It comes-down from the oligarchs sitting on the Supreme Court, so I'm not surprised that the European court might reach a different conclusion (i.e. even 11 words violates the artists' exclusive copy license).
That's only ten. And "pressclipping" isn't a word so it doesn't count. Mind you, the court made a similar mistake. Observe the example given in the ruling of an 11-word extract (5 words either side of TDC):
"a forthcoming sale of the telecommunications group TDC which is expected to be bought"
In theory, copyright is upheld to allow amortization of production costs through reproduction sales. Quoting portions of a text in a search response only serves to help that text be located, and perhaps, a sale made. There should be a law against convoluted laws.
More problematic is the absence of any concept of fair use. The court did not say that 11 word quotations were necessarily infringinig, though: they pushed that decision back on the lower court.
Next, merely refering to the thing will get you sued, until you cant even read the thing without promising you will forget what you read. And sooner or later we will just forget about people copyrighting their work alltogether, and just like Darth Sidious said "and then.. we shall have peace".
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.
IMHO copyright should be severely limited to a much smaller subset or what appears to be covered in today's interpretation.
Copyright should only cover *original* work. News is not original as it is simply an account of an event. Neither are sets of data such as nutrition tables, product lists or any other recording of factual data - regardless of the effort involved in compiling them. Just because you put time into gathering information does not imply that you and only you should thereafter have control of
As far as I can tell, the decision said only that the 11-word snippets did not fall under a "transient copying" exception, not that they consisted copying substantial enough to infringe copyright.
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,
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.
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...
I wonder how far you could take this (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps eventually quoting the law that makes quoting things illegal will be illegal. Why not, wells fargo is suing wells fargo and AT&T charging a discount fee for discounts it would make perfect sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Almost as bad when BMW told me that if I wanted replace my burnt-out bulbs under warranty it would be f
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
In a car the dealership is not owned by BMW. Their service department is reimbursed by BMW USA to perform the service, parts and labor. The parent poster wanted to put in a different bulb he would pay for, reducing BMW's immediate cost and future liability (they obviously wouldn't be on the hook to replace it the next time around).
My suspicion is that it was about bureaucracy. The dealership can't be reimbursed for the labor without adding the part, and if they didn't install a part they billed BMW for i
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly agreedâ"at least to the workings. However, I would not attribute this to bureaucracy, but rather to finance. I don't think anyone wants to be financially liable for anything that they cannot control the cost on.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's try a computer analogy here. This is kinda' like having an iPod or MacBook with non-replaceable battery. It actually is replaceable but is PitA to do so and Apple says it should be performed by warranty type shop. And if you bought an aftermarket battery, with longer life, yeah, Apple probably wouldn't do that under warranty either.
Re: (Score:2)
I totally understand warranties, and 3rd party products, etc...but there gets to be a point of the spirit of the rule and what it was intended to handle.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 dri
Re:I wonder how far you could take this (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If you're talking about those hideous ultra-bright blindness beams that assholes have been putting on their cars lately, refusing to install them is in everyone's best interest.
The lights were to replace the yellow daytime running lights with white DRLs. At night I have xenons. So nope, but thanks for trying.
BTW those "ultra-bright blindness beams..." are not really ultra-bright, they are normal lights (typically with a light blue "paint" on the bulb). People who do installs either forget to adjust the height of the lights or purposefully set them high. So instead of the light hitting the back of the car in front of them (at license plate level or lower) it hits the rear vie
Wells Fargo has indeed contested their own lawsuit (Score:2)
Wells Fargo sueing itself (for default loans) is required to properly acquire payment. It is not like they are going to contest it and sit in court aruging with each other.
Wells Fargo has already contested their own lawsuit. From the summary [slashdot.org]: "Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied."
Re: (Score:2)
The point was more that such absurd situations DO occur rather than the actual technicalities of the situations.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently, the news clipping service would have been fine if it had just emailed the eleven word clippings, published them on the web, and/or published them on paper that's designed to self-destruct itself. Their point seems to be that copyright doesn't seem to apply when text is "transient".
The ruling doesn't specifically mention the workarounds of using invisible ink, writing things on your hand, using a etch-a-sketch, and/or making temporary snow angels, but those "transient" writing techniques certainl
Re: (Score:2)
Only one so far that I know of, but they may decide it's a good program and expand it.
But why would they not want this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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"?
Re: (Score:2)
Da Da Da Dum.
Three notes. Not even the notes. I bet you didn't just deadpan it out either.
And I bet you thought "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony" (even if you don't remember the name).
That's a completely different situation because Ludwig van Beethoven died before 1939.
Re: (Score:2)
Da Da Da Dum.
Three notes.
It's actually "Ba ba ba BOM!", and that's four notes.
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11-words extract of the article (Score:5, Funny)
Five Words (Score:2, Funny)
De minimis non curat lex.
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)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's the search engines who are being greedy. The search engines' content is all the sites they index. The search engines want to get that content for free, and only the few indexed sites at the top of the list get anything in return for producing that content. To make matters worse, that top few often has to pay to be there, so the search engines offer nothing in return for their free content.
I don't think the newspapers have a problem with showing up in search results. I think their problem is eve
Re: (Score:2)
You misunderstand. It is not that they want to block their articles and summaries from being carried and indexed, hence darwining themselves out of business, such as the Belgium publishers who refuse to use robots.txt to block Google demonstrate. Ultimately they both actually want their stuff to be indexed and carried, even if becomes necessary to find ways to force others to carry their links and summarizes, while at the same time they want to force those they hope they can force to carry their stuff to
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That is what they are really after.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to write better stuff.
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Ssssst. Don't tell them.
Less links = less income = earlier death for the dead-tree-media.
You mean like google? (Score:2)
However, would you like it if, instead of visiting your site every day, they visited a central site that listed the stories on it instead.
You mean like google?
They still have to buy the newspaper or visit the website to read the actual story.
Re: (Score:2)
They still go to the website if they get the headlines and links from a third party but they don't go via the homepage. They'll get far fewer page views from someone who gets a list of their stories on a third party site than if they go to their front page to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
The counter to that argument is that (just throwing out a random website) for all the people who use various content aggregators to get NYtimes articles instead of going through the NYtimes homepage, there are probably just as many people who have no particular interested in the NYtimes, but get sent to random NYtimes articles by various content aggregators. Does that make sense?
I'm not searching reddit for NYtimes articles in lieu of going to the NYtimes homepage. If a reddit link sends me there, then that
Re: (Score:2)
If they did, they neever would have gone to the central site in the first place. They would have found the original article when they logged in. I go to google for news not "http://abcnews.go.com" because I find that google's automated search is a FAR FAR BETTER service than abcnews.
At heart, what is going on is company A is saying "Company B is better than my company. Make them pay me or go out of business so I can su
"Fair use" is an American concept (Score:2)
It comes-down from the oligarchs sitting on the Supreme Court, so I'm not surprised that the European court might reach a different conclusion (i.e. even 11 words violates the artists' exclusive copy license).
10-word extract coming up (Score:3, Funny)
From TFA:
A Danish pressclipping company could be violating copyright by printing
Expecting to be sued for copyright violation in 3...2...1...
Re: (Score:2)
That's only ten. And "pressclipping" isn't a word so it doesn't count. Mind you, the court made a similar mistake. Observe the example given in the ruling of an 11-word extract (5 words either side of TDC):
"a forthcoming sale of the telecommunications group TDC which is expected to be bought"
Re: (Score:2)
That's only ten.
Well yes, there's always the other solution:
Adanishpressclippingcompany couldbeviolatingcopyrightbyprintingout elevenwordsnippetsofnewsarticles theeuropeancourtofjusticeruled theluxembourgbasedcourt remandedtheissuetodenmark foradeterminationonwhetherthesnippets compriseintellectualproperty.
Eight words. You could do it in even less, but the Slashdot lameness filter is apparently in league with the copyright mafia.
Production costs vs reproduction costs (Score:2)
Printed copies are obviously not transient (Score:2)
More problematic is the absence of any concept of fair use. The court did not say that 11 word quotations were necessarily infringinig, though: they pushed that decision back on the lower court.
That's actually a good thing (Score:3, Funny)
Next, merely refering to the thing will get you sued, until you cant even read the thing without promising you will forget what you read. And sooner or later we will just forget about people copyrighting their work alltogether, and just like Darth Sidious said "and then.. we shall have peace".
Copyright is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
IMHO copyright should be severely limited to a much smaller subset or what appears to be covered in today's interpretation.
Copyright should only cover *original* work. News is not original as it is simply an account of an event. Neither are sets of data such as nutrition tables, product lists or any other recording of factual data - regardless of the effort involved in compiling them. Just because you put time into gathering information does not imply that you and only you should thereafter have control of
(C) (Score:2)
Not quite what they said (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, the decision said only that the 11-word snippets did not fall under a "transient copying" exception, not that they consisted copying substantial enough to infringe copyright.
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,
Pulling stories from the memory hole (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fair use can apply to an entire work. In your example it probably would.
You probably would also have difficulty enforcing copyright at all on most of your short "zingers".
Re: (Score:2)