
High Court ruling implies headlines are copyright - lotusleaf1987
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/27/high-court-ruling-implies-headlines-are-copyright-were-one-step-away-from-links/
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notahacker
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://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85340078-e660-11df-95f9-00144feab49a.html#axzz16VYvf5wv)
[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005961/times-
paywall-its-still-early-days-but-what-do-the-numbers-say/)

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.

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ig1
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.

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kbutler
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>

kb

~~~
ig1
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).

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j_baker
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.

~~~
ig1
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.

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

~~~
ig1
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.

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obsessive1
This can only end badly.

