UK Appeals Court Agrees That Clicking A Link And Opening A Website... Is Infringing

from the are-they-serious? dept

Late last year there was a ridiculous ruling against news aggregator Meltwater in the UK. Meltwater, like a number of other news aggregators, pulls together headlines from various online news stories, along with brief snippets of the articles, and links to those articles, helping people find news relevant to them. It's your classic news aggregator. Meltwater focused on an enterprise market, helping companies or PR people keep tabs on what was being said about them or about topics of interest. Pretty standard stuff. But the ruling said that just headlines could be covered by copyright, and thus Meltwater infringed by simply showing headlines and links. I didn't write about it at the time, on the assumption that this was just a clueless ruling that would hopefully be overturned on appeal... but no such luck. The Appeals Court has allowed the lower court ruling to stand, meaning that anyone doing news aggregation in the UK may have to start paying newspapers for the "privilege" of linking to them.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Almost everything in the ruling is ridiculous, frankly. Let's dig into a few of the points from the original ruling, as highlighted by the Independent (first link above):

* The headlines to the various articles reproduced in Meltwater News were capable of being literary works independently of the article to which they related;

Generally speaking, in the US, we don't consider headlines to have enough creative elements to be covered by copyright independent of the article. And that seems reasonable. Does anyone honestly believe that copyright is necessary to incentivize the creation of creative headlines? The whole point of a headline is to sell the story. There's plenty of incentive there. Putting copyright on headlines makes no sense at all.

* The extracts from the articles reproduced in Meltwater News with or without the headline to the article were capable of being a substantial part of the literary work consisting of the article as a whole;

Meltwater News tried to get us as a customer two years ago, and sent us some sample reports, so I'm actually quite familiar with their "snippets." They are clearly designed to get you to click through, and not at all designed to provide a "substantial" part of the literary work. Here's a screenshot from a report they sent us: Yeah. I'm sorry, but those "extracts" are hardly "substantial," and they clearly do not suffice as a replacement for the original.

* Accordingly each of the copies made by Meltwater News' end-users' computers in receiving the e-mail from Meltwater, opening it, and accessing the Meltwater website by clicking on the link to the article, and the copies of the article itself made when clicking on the link indicated by Meltwater News was, on the face of it, a breach of the publishers' copyright;

Read that again. Especially the last part. The copies of the article itself made when clicking a link were infringing. There's no way to respond to that other than to say that's insane. That means the entire web is infringing. Any time you open any web page, according to this ruling, you are likely infringing on the site's copyright.

* Legislation dealing with temporary copies, or fair dealing for copyright material, or Database Regulations did not allow such copying;

If so, the UK really needs to fix its copyright laws, because that's crazy.

* Thus, the end-user required a licence from NLA or the publisher in order lawfully to receive and use the Meltwater news service.

And, thus, the web dies in the UK. But now, suddenly, I'm tempted to send a bill to any UK newspaper that links to Techdirt going forward...

Filed Under: clicks, copyright, infringement, links, uk
Companies: meltwater

Ad Blindness Rules: Even Fewer People Clicking Ads

from the bye-bye dept

We've been discussing why online advertising is often a bad idea for advertisers (not so much for many publishers, but that's a different issue), as ad blindness rules the day. Now there's even more evidence, as the already tiny clickthrough rate on online ads is dropping, rapidly. Basically, it sounds like more and more people are simply ignoring online ads, which is to be expected, since they rarely (if ever?) add much of value. This is the advertisers' fault. There are lots of ways that advertisers could actually add value for consumers/readers/users online -- but they're all so scared to death of actually taking that step. Instead, many are so focused on obsolete metrics like the CPM, that they're unable or unwilling to really branch out and try marketing and advertising programs that actually are effective. Simply tossing up more ad banners isn't doing the trick. Really engaging with users would help, but most brands still haven't figured out quite how to do that, even if it isn't particularly complex.

Filed Under: ad blindness, ads, clicks

Surprise: Advertisers Win Money From Google For Over-Budget Clicks

from the didn't-see-that-coming dept

Back in 2005, we wrote about how Google was sued because AdWords users were being charged more than their "daily budgets" for ads on the site. The case initially got plenty of attention after pretty much all of the mainstream press reported that the Howard Stern listed as a plaintiff was "the Howard Stern" of radio fame -- though, that was later disputed. Either way, the case itself (famous Howard Stern or not) was still interesting. Since advertisers pay based on clicks, and the price of the clicks isn't always known until the click happens, the "daily budget" that any advertiser sets for ads is impossible to match exactly. Thus, there will be days when the daily budget is exceeded -- but that wasn't acceptable to those suing, who found the whole thing misleading. After a court refused (twice) to give summary judgment to Google, it looks like the company has decided to throw $20 million at the problem to make it go away via settlement (a decently large chunk, of course, goes to the class action lawyers who brought the suit). This is a bit of a surprise, since you would think Google has a pretty clear case, as the terms of its agreement with advertisers was pretty clear on what was going on -- but perhaps Google thinks it's smarter to just pay up and keep advertisers happy.

Filed Under: ads, budgets, clicks
Companies: google