Slashdot Mirror
11-Word Extracts May Infringe Copyright In Europe
splodus writes "The European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court, has ruled that a service providing 11-word snippets of newspaper articles could be unlawful. Media monitoring company Infopaq International searches newspaper articles and provides clients with a keyword and the five words either side. This practice was challenged by the DDF, a group representing newspaper interests, as infringing their members' copyright. The court has referred the issue back to national courts to determine whether copyright laws in each country will be subject to the ruling. The full ruling is available at the European Court of Justice Web site."
However, would you like it if, instead of visiting your site every day, they visited a central site that listed the stories on it instead. You ended up not getting homepage views and viewers on average visited few pages if they visited. For popular sites, this could represent a massive drop in revenue.
Some places just don't like the principle of a robot systematically plowing through their site and copying an publishing many pages worth of text written by them on a daily basis. Even if the snippets themselves are small, overall, huge amounts of content is being ripped automatically from their site and being profited upon by someone.
It's one thing saying "they're suing because of 11 words!", it's another saying "they're suing for pages upon pages being ripped on a regular basis"