High Court ruling implies headlines are copyright

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/27/high-court-ruling-implies-headlines-are-copyright-were-one-step-away-from-links/

by lotusleaf1987 • 16 years ago

24 23 16 years ago

eu.techcrunch.com

ig19• 16 years ago

I don't think it's unreasonable that headlines are copyrightable, certainly newspaper editors put a lot of time and creative work into headline writing.

For example the British tabloid The Sun is famous for it's headlines (notable examples include "Freddie Star Ate My Hamster" and "It's the Sun wot won it").

Unlike patents, copyright doesn't block independent invention. If two people come up with the same identical headline (for example the News Chronicle's famous "Hitler Dead") then it's not a copyright infringement.

In my personal opinion it's perfectly reasonable for a news website to ask people not to reproduce their headlines (or link to their stories). Sure it's not good for news aggregators, but the aggregators don't have any inherent right to make money off other people's content.

carbocation4• 16 years ago

> In my personal opinion it's perfectly reasonable for a news website to ask people not to reproduce their headlines (or link to their stories).

Asking people not to link to your stories is absurd on its face when you put your material on the Internet.

ig19• 16 years ago

You could say exactly the same thing about hot-linking images. Or asking people not to share your telephone number.

Ignoring the legal issues, if someone asks you not to link to their website then the polite thing to do is not to link to it.

Of course there might be some cases where you might be justified in liking against the owner's wishes (for example criticism, review, etc.) - however if your just linking because it adds value to your own site, then frankly that's just being a jerk.

kbutler• 16 years ago

If the headline is not copyable, how would I cite an article in a newspaper? "The second article down in the left-hand column of the front page of The Sun on 2010/11/27?"

Copyright prevents copying the expression of ideas. If an idea is expressible in only one or a few ways, copyright is not appropriate.

The smaller the expression, the fewer ways exist to express the idea.

Where do you draw the line between a "creative" headline, and a headline that just expresses the idea as concisely as possible?

Surely some individual phrases in the article require "a lot of time and creative work" - can those not be quoted elsewhere?

The US Copyright office has this one correct:

"Several categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection. These include among others: ... Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; ..."

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

ig19• 16 years ago

There is no line that defines what's copyrightable and what's not. That's why we have courts to decide the borderline stuff.

The 80:20 ratio of software development applies to the legal system as well. Tightly specifying the legal code for the borderline 20% would require so much work and added complexity to be almost impossible. Hence we instead use the court system to decide on the borderline cases.

Generally a wide range of factors are taken into account when quoting a work. This includes the length of the quotation (in proportion to the whole work) and the context the quotation is used in.

So for example short poems (<10 words) have received protection in the past, because the 10 word quotation forms a substantial proportion of the work.

The argument for protecting headlines comes down to whether headlines are works in their own right. Given that they can stand on their own independent of the articles they're associated with means that the probably do qualify to be treated as works on their own right.

The creativity and originality criteria are tricky, it's likely that some headlines are copyrightable but others aren't. Only a court judgement can clearly but a headline in one category or other.

But as I said elsewhere, this is only relevant if you are copying from another source. If you write a headline that happens to be identical to another headline then that isn't a copyright violation (regardless of length).

hxa7241• 16 years ago

> certainly newspaper editors put a lot of time and creative work into headline writing

But that is not the basis of copyright. The purpose (mechanism-wise) of copyright is this: keep prices high enough to allow producers to cover costs.

Would increased copying of headlines drive down the price of the product being sold? That does not seem sensible. In fact, it seems more likely that the opposite would happen. So how is copyright monopoly justified here? -- it does not appear to be.

> the aggregators don't have any inherent right to make money off other people's content

Yes, actually, they have exactly that, as we all do. Benefit is not a zero-sum game. Copyright removes that natural freedom only for particular circumstances, and only because it is thought pragmatically useful to do so.

chc2• 16 years ago

As somebody in the newspaper business, I think it's very unreasonable. Editors also put a lot of effort into choosing good font faces, weights and sizes, but you're insane if you think you own the copyright on mixing 11.3 pt Minion Pro-Demi with 12 pt Balboa-Bold. The fact of the matter is, it may in fact be an excellent and highly creative look, but it's still unreasonable to copyright something that simple.

Headlines are even worse, because they're the piece's name. If headlines fall under copyright, it becomes potentially illegal to talk about a news article. That makes copyrighting a standard font library look downright logical.

ig19• 16 years ago

Citation for the purpose of discussing the piece is likely to fall under the protection of fair use/fair dealing exceptions under copyright law.

obsessive1• 16 years ago

This can only end badly.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

What does this mean for copyrighting tweets? All my tweets are micro-blog headlines.

ig19• 16 years ago

It depends on the tweet, if it meets the criteria for copyright than it probably will be. There are several poems which are shorter than 140 characters which have been protected by copyright law, so the length isn't the controlling factor.

notahacker• 16 years ago

The article mentions headlines and short excerpts. I'm not sure how long the excerpts in question are, but good news journalism conveys the key facts of the story in the first paragraph. Newswires marketing themselves as providing "business intelligence" often keep at least the most recent headlines behind the paywall because the headlines themselves constitute the a large proportion of the value to subscribers. Although they're an aggregator rather than a content-provider, this is one of the markets that Meltwater compete in. Moreover they're charging a not-inexpensive fee for access to the service, and competing to a certain extent with subscription aggregators like Factiva and Nexis that do pay licence fees to the content providers for all results referred.

Of course, I'm also not ruling out the possibility they're shooting themselves in the foot here and Meltwater users happily click through to read full content in a large proportion of searches and (directly or indirectly) pay licensing fees. I doubt the very public spat with Google News and paywall erection strategy for the Times is working for News International http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85340078-e660-11df-95f9-00144feab4... http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005...

The UK courts have long supported copyright trolls who claim ownership of widely-established facts like the football fixture list without there being any wider ramifications for free dissemination of information, so I wouldn't read too much into it.

j_baker• 16 years ago

Does the UK not have a concept of Fair Use? It would seem to me that quoting an article's headline would fall under that.

ig19• 16 years ago

It has an approximately equivalent Fair Dealing, but in general fair dealing/fair use gives much weaker protection to commercial users than to personal or academic users.

High Court ruling implies headlines are copyright

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