De-FUD: Misappropriation Doctrine Defeats Nothing July 13, 2009
This week the Threat Level blog writes that the 91 year old misappropriation doctrine defeated a news aggregator site.
The misappropriation doctrine came out of a 1918 case called International News Service v. Associate Press. Yes, the same Associated Press. In that case the AP sued International News Service for essentially copying AP articles posted in public, and telegraphing them across the country before AP could publish those articles in other states. While the stories themselves weren’t subject to copyright (facts not being copyrightable), the Supreme Court said that the AP had a very limited in time right to profit off of the work they put in to gathering the news.
The AP recently sued an online news aggregator service under the same theory. However, the suit settled before a court could rule on whether or not this relic of a doctrine has survived revisions to the Copyright Act and fundamental changes in the way news is delivered. In short, the misappropriation, or “Hot News” doctrine, as Threat Level is calling it, was only argued, but never ruled upon. There are many reasons the defendant may have chosen to settle. It is unlikely that the force of the APs argument was one of them.
UPDATE: So after I wrote this post Wired substantially revised the article. The title changed from “‘Hot News’ Doctrine Defeats Aggregator Site” to “AP Defeats Online Aggregator That Rewrote Its News.” The first paragraph when from “In a victory for authentic news sites, The Associated Press has defeated an online aggregator in a federal court lawsuit relying on 91-year-old legal theory that does not rest on copyright ownership.” to “The Associated Press has defeated a news aggregation site it sued under a 91-year-old legal theory that does not rest on copyright ownership.”
The third paragraph also changed from “In that ruling’s aftermath, the parties announced the settlement Monday afternoon, in which All Headline News also agreed to pay an undisclosed monetary award to the New York-based wire service.” to “The parties announced the settlement Monday afternoon, in which All Headline News also agreed to pay an undisclosed monetary award to the New York-based wire service.”
The body of our original post will remain unchanged. One thing to note, apparently the judge did consider at least part of the misappropriation doctrine, but the extent of the opinion isn’t clear. Nothing was nearly as final, or clear as the Threat Level article made it out to be.
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- Scribd Sued For Copyright Infringement The online document sharing service Scribd.com is being sued for...
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