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."

Comments

TFA just did

[iamapizza]

Europe's highest court held that the 11-word extracts were indeed "reproduction in part" under intellectual property laws. The court described transient acts as being "created and deleted automatically and without human intervention," such as those allowing for database browsing and caching. Such acts must also be incidental, the court said.

They didn't say it had to be continuous...

I wonder how far you could take this

[Shadow of Eternity]

Perhaps eventually quoting the law that makes quoting things illegal will be illegal. Why not, wells fargo is suing wells fargo and AT&T charging a discount fee for discounts it would make perfect sense.

Re:I wonder how far you could take this

[Shin-LaC]

If you're talking about those hideous ultra-bright blindness beams that assholes have been putting on their cars lately, refusing to install them is in everyone's best interest.

But why would they not want this?

[furby076]

So a company searches the intarweb for news stories and displays a snippit (11 words) of this on their site with a link to the newspaper (driving up their readership). This is free advertisement for newspapers, and as they should know free advertisement is almost as awesome as free beer!

Re:But why would they not want this?

[pjt33]

Nothing to do with the "intarweb". They were taking dead-tree newspapers, scanning, OCRing, extracting snippets from the resulting text, and printing them. Actually if this had been entirely electronic the ruling would have been different, because one of the two rulings is that the last step of making a physical print-out is non-transient, and thus one exemption is ruled not to apply.

The other ruling is that an 11 word extract is not automatically incapable of being worthy of copyright protection: (my emphasis)

An act occurring during a data capture process, which consists of storing an extract of a protected work comprising 11 words and printing out that extract, is such as to come within the concept of reproduction in part within the meaning of Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, if the elements thus reproduced are the expression of the intellectual creation of their author; it is for the national court to make this determination.

This isn't entirely unreasonable, because otherwise haiku authors be rather unprotected.

Finally, to answer your original question of why they don't want this: I think it's because the purpose here isn't to create an index for people in general to use but to create a resource for Infopaq's researchers to then write original content summarising the news.

Re:But why would they not want this?

[nagnamer]

if the elements thus reproduced are the expression of the intellectual creation of their author

"I love you too, Honey Bunny!"

How many of you said Pulp Fiction when they saw it? And it's just 6 words.

How about "Luke, I'm your father"?

11-words extract of the article

[euyis]

"The has that a of could be and with a the."

Five Words

[Anonymous Coward]

De minimis non curat lex.

I'd love to be plagiarized like this...

[tjstork]

I really don't understand how Newspapers would not want the traffic that a link would generate. There is nothing more than I would love to have than a thousand sites with 11 word snippets of my articles linking back to me.

Seems foolish.

Re:I'd love to be plagiarized like this...

[simcop2387]

that's just it, most of them want that traffic, but they also want to be paid for the privilege of having a link to the article. it's just them being greedy.

Re:I'd love to be plagiarized like this...

[tjstork]

that's just it, most of them want that traffic, but they also want to be paid for the privilege of having a link to the article. it's just them being greedy.

Me thinks they need to learn that the internet is pretty unforgiving when it comes to shoddy content.

10-word extract coming up

[rxmd]

From TFA:

A Danish pressclipping company could be violating copyright by printing

Expecting to be sued for copyright violation in 3...2...1...

That's actually a good thing

[jerep]

Next, merely refering to the thing will get you sued, until you cant even read the thing without promising you will forget what you read. And sooner or later we will just forget about people copyrighting their work alltogether, and just like Darth Sidious said "and then.. we shall have peace".

Aftermarket lightsâ¦

[jscotta44]

The BMW thing does make sense. The time used in replacing your burned out bulb is paid for by BMW on the original lights. It is a light that BMW has confidence in and they know the reliability of the bulbs and thus can reliably predict a cost to themselves. The aftermarket stuff is not approved by them, they know nothing about it, its problems, the cost of the bulbs, or life expectancy. They will not pay for it because they cannot reliably determine what their liability will be.

This is similar to web developers who will guarantee their work and/or provide some sort of fixed fee structure to maintain a site that they build provided the code is only modified by them and no others. Once another developer starts altering code, their confidence on what is going on drops dramatically and they can no longer reliably predict what their time liability will be and thus their own cost to work on the code. They'll then switch to an hourly charge to fix/maintain the code. Makes sense to me.

Re:Aftermarket lightsâ¦

[Obfuscant]

The worst that would happen is the lightbulb burns out sooner (it's a lightbulb).

You have no imagination.

The worst that could happen is that the light shorts out, is improperly fused, and the wiring starts an engine fire that destroys the car. Or the light itself draws too much current, overheats and melts the reflector/housing, starting an engine fire. (You say it is a halogen bulb, which DOES run a lot hotter than normal tungsten bulbs.)

Or it simply creates a large amount of smoke, distracting the driver who abandons the car in the middle of the motorway causing a multi-car pileup.

BMW is quite right not to pay for installing third-party hardware on their vehicles. They have no way of judging the risks from cheaply-made crap that people ask to have installed. Even for something as simple as a halogen light bulb, many of which have caused house fires in cheap accent lights.

Copyright is Evil

[whisper_jeff]

I'm fed up. Copyright is evil. I'm a graphic designer who's worked as a writer and an editor so, needless to say, a great deal of my living is made on works protected by copyright but enough is enough. It's a joke. The original intent of copyrights has been so grossly perverted and abused that they're simply evil now. They no longer protect those they were intended to protect and they are abused by those who have absolutely nothing to do with the actual creative works. They're evil.

what about quoting someone?

[openright]

If the newspapers can claim that an 11 word phrase is copyrighted, then a person should be able to claim that a statement is copyrighted,
and the newspapers would be prevented from making direct quotes.

--- a future newspaper article --- ...
With these events, we should be reminded of the words of John F. Kennedy: (paraphase*) "[Do not ask what services your government can provide for you. Instead ask your government how you can help.]".

* The original quote is owned by the Kennedy family,

Pulling stories from the memory hole

[HTH NE1]

Years ago, there was a current story (same day) that was indexed by Google but which the originating site had pulled from the web. Google wouldn't provide a copy of their cache for it and only give me a short snippet in the search results.

So I took two or three words at the start of the snippet, turned them into a quoted phrase, and did a "site:" search of them and the headline. That got me a few more words. Same for words at the end of the snippet. Pretty soon I had the entire paragraph.

However, Google wouldn't give preceding or following words past the paragraph mark, so I had to guess at unique words that would be in other paragraphs, and no clues as to the order of the paragraphs. I do believe I managed to retrieve the entire story in this manner without providing a hit for the originating site, but then, they apparently didn't want the traffic since they'd pulled the story from the site.

Re:"Fair use" is an American concept

[maxwell demon]

I'm pretty sure those combinations appear en masse in out-of-copyright texts. Also note that copyright works differently from patents in that I'm only infringing if I actually copy from you, not if I accidently write the same text. While it's very unlikely that I would e.g. write the exact wording of your complete post by myself (so if I wrote that text it would be strong evidence that I copied it from you), in general you'd be hard pressed to convince someone that a random use of those two-word phrases were copied from your copyrighted text, rather than either copied from elsewhere or created independently.