(1) The headlines to the various articles reproduced in Meltwater News are capable of being literary works independently of the article to which they relate.
(2) The extracts from the articles reproduced in Meltwater News with or without the headline to that article are capable of being a substantial part of the literary work consisting of the article as a whole.
(3) Accordingly the copies made by the end-user's computer of (a) Meltwater News (i) on receipt of the email from Meltwater, (ii) opening that email, (iii) accessing the Meltwater website by clicking on the link to the article and (b) of the article itself when (iv) clicking on the link indicated by Meltwater News are and each of them is, prima facie, an infringement of the Publishers' copyright.
(4) No such copies are permitted (a) by s.28A CDPA dealing with temporary copies, or (b) as fair dealing within s.30 CDPA, or (c) by the Database Regulations.
(5) Accordingly, the end-user requires a licence from NLA or the Publishers, whether or not in the form of the WEUL in order lawfully to receive and use the Meltwater News Service.
Which is not about the user copying but Meltwater's summaries and distribution of them being illegal. Google should note this and immediately stop crawling the internet in the UK as this behaviour is clearly illegal as headlines are creative works.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Google had numerous discreet licencing agreements with UK copyright trolls in place already
A key difference between Meltwater and Google News is that Meltwater is charging the end user for the excerpts they scraped (I'm not going to contact their account managers to try to understand their pricing structure, but I strongly suspect that it includes a component related to level of usage and or quantity of targeted content served).
Meltwater's service is more analogous to Factiva and LexisNexis, whose licencing structure is almost certainly more favourable to the publishers.
It ought to be of some concern to other providers of SaaS feed readers, media analytics and the like though.
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2011/890.html