In Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote granted AP's motion for summary judgment with one exception holding that "AP has shown through undisputed evidence that Meltwater's copying is not protected by the fair use doctrine." Meltwater's application for summary judgment was dismissed. Judge Cote said "Through its use of AP content and refusal to pay a licensing fee, Meltwater has obtained an unfair commercial advantage in the marketplace and directly harmed the creator of expressive content protected by the Copyright Act".
The judge noted that whilst commercial Internet news clipping
services like Meltwater perform an important function for their customers, that "does not outweigh the strong public interest in the enforcement of
the copyright laws or justify allowing Meltwater to free ride on the costly
news gathering and coverage work performed by other organizations. Moreover,
permitting Meltwater to avoid paying licensing fees gives it an unwarranted
advantage over its competitors who do pay licensing fees".
AP CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement "This ruling makes it crystal clear that Meltwater wrongly used news content from AP to create its own content, while paying none of the costs associated with creating original news content,"
Vowing to appeal, Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyseggen said in a statement “We’re disappointed by the court’s decision and we strongly disagree with it” adding “We’re considering all of our options, but we look forward to having this decision reviewed by the Court of Appeals, which we are confident will see the case a different way.” The company also stated in its press release that it "believes the ruling misapplies the fair use doctrine and is at odds with a variety of prior decisions that have paved the way for today’s Internet.”
In July 2011 the United Kingdom the Court of Appeal upheld the ruling of Mrs
Justice Proudman that end-users of media monitoring service Meltwater required
end-user licences to access and use search results consisting of the headline
of each article which mentions the search term (which hyperlinks to the
article), the opening words of that article and an 11-word extract showing the
context in which the search term appears.
The Associated Press v Meltwater U.S. Holdings Inc,
12-cv-1087, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
The Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd & Others v Meltwater
Holding BV & Others [2011] EWCA Civ 890)
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