Is Scraping Excerpts Illegal After All?
By Anna Johnson on March 9th, 2009The widely held belief that it’s perfectly legal to copy blog excerpts has recently come under question. Word is that some media companies are starting to resent bloggers and others from seemingly making money off the media companies’ content, and at their expense.
According to The New York Times, some media industry executives believe that copying content from elsewhere is reducing readership and profits for the original content publishers.
While there seems little argument that copying entire articles without attribution amounts to copyright infringement, complainants seem to be turning their attention to even short excerpts of articles.
For example, last year GateHouse Media sued The New York Times Company, arguing that one of the company’s newspapers, The Boston Globe, had copied headlines and lead sentences of GateHouse’s articles. Because the case was settled, the question was never tested in court.
U.S. copyright law has a general ‘fair use’ defence against copyright infringement which takes into account the purpose and substantiality of a given extract.
By way of comparison, in Australia, the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) allows for ‘fair dealing’ in relation to a work which, among other things, permits extracts to be quoted for the purpose of reporting news in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, film, or broadcast (no mention of the Internet), as long as the author and title of the work is acknowledged.
Extracts can also be used for the purpose of criticism or review, again provided the author and title are acknowledged, and the dealing is ‘fair’ (as defined by the Act).
It seems U.S. copyright law is not so prescriptive, which has left many in doubt over the extent to which extracts are legal.
What’s more, the Internet introduces a new dimension to use and re-use of content, which, even under Australian law, brings the question of ‘fair’ into doubt. And, as noted above, even the news exception under Australian law does not specifically mention the Internet.
Unfortunately, tough economic times can tend to bring out ‘litigiousness’ in people, and traditional news publishers, in particular, are suffering right now. On that basis, don’t be surprised to see copyright infringement lawsuits on the rise.
Source: Brian Stelter, ” Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt,” The New York Times, March 1, 2009
March 11th, 2009 at 2:29 am
With my tongue wedged firmly in my cheek, might I ask whether the word “proscriptive” might be preferable over “prescriptive” when referring to US copyright law
March 11th, 2009 at 4:27 am
Quite possibly John! But I guess it depends which side you’re arguing…