Headline copyright shock horror!
Jinfo Blog
10th September 2010
Item
News headlines are too short and insubstantial to qualify for copyright protection, an Australian court has ruled. The ruling was given in a case involving LexisNexis, and could conceivably have implications for a High Court action that the Newspaper Licensing Agency is currently pursuing in the United Kingdom. In a case brought in the Federal Court of Australia, the newspaper publisher Fairfax alleged that the use of headlines from the Australian Financial Review (which it publishes) in LexisNexis Australiaâs ABIX abstracting service infringed Fairfaxâs copyright. However the Court ruled that, despite the âskill and labourâ involved in writing headlines, they were simply meta-information about the work, required for effective citation of the article, and should be excluded from copyright protection, as were titles generally (full judgement at http://digbig.com/5bchss). Reporting on the judgement in a LexisNexis blog, the lawyer representing LexisNexis in the case, Jon Swinson, pointed out that there is no general âfair useâ defence in Australia, although there is a limited and specific defence in the Australian Copyright Act for the reporting of news, on which Justice Annabelle Bennett said LexisNexis could rely. The Court also recognised that LexisNexis invested skill, labour and effort in preparing its abstracts and the use of a headline as a proper citation had to be considered in this context (http://digbig.com/5bchst). It remains to be seen what bearing if any the ruling may have on the cases involving the commercial use of web links being considered in the UK by the Copyright Tribunal and the High Court (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27632 http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27815 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29171 for background) â although the issue is admittedly not quite the same. But, writing in his Media Guardian blog, Roy Greenslade suggests that it has âfar-reaching implications for publishers who are seeking to seal off their editorial content from people who do not pay for access to their online materialâ (http://digbig.com/5bchsw). Intriguingly, Fairfax doesnât in this case seem to have attempted to question LexisNexisâs right to summarise its articles, even though the creation of an abstract may be regarded as a direct attempt by a competitor to substitute for the original copy â far more so than reproducing the headline, in fact. Elsewhere, LexisNexis is currently in negotiation with an unnamed media company about carrying abstracts of News International items following that companyâs decision to remove all its archived full text material from Nexis (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30255). As previously mentioned on LiveWire, abstracting still remains a bit of a legal grey area. The fact that Fairfax went in this instance for the headlines rather than the abstracts â and lost â suggests that thereâs much more to come on this vexed topic of reporting other peopleâs news.About this article
- Blog post title: Headline copyright shock horror!
- Link to this page
- View printable version
What's new at Jinfo?
The AI agents are coming!
Community session
16th July 2024
GenAI in the news, access to private company data evolves and suppliers are getting to grips with AI
Blog posting
5th June 2024
Preqin's for sale. If you're a client, do this now
YouTube video
20th June 2024
- Jinfo Community session (TBC) (Community) 25th September 2024
- The AI agents are coming! (Community) 16th July 2024
- US private company data – what’s new? (Community) 18th June 2024
Learn more about the Jinfo Subscription