It might very well be applied to blog-spam, that simply excerpts parts of an article without adding anything. Good riddance to that.
It wasn't "a bit" at all, read the article. News stories are written in pyramid style, with the most important summary being in the lede, the first paragraph. That is what was being copied, as well as the title and any mention in the article that contained whatever keyword the user used for the search.
In this case the copier was also charging users directly for the content, it wasn't some indirect thing. Your summary seems both inaccurate and alarmist.
I personally applaud this decision, and I am also a bit surprised that EFF would support the scrappers.
I also like this quote and think the Judge is exactly right: "Judge Cote rejected the fair use claim in large part because she didn’t buy Meltwater’s claim that it’s a “search engine” that makes transformative use of the AP’s content. Instead, Cote concluded that Meltwater is more like a business rival to AP: “Instead of driving subscribers to third-party websites, Meltwater News acts as a substitute for news sites operated or licensed by AP.”
If you're a blog who reposts the core parts of news stories and gives no incentive for users to actually read the original story, then yes, you're probably infringing, but that was true before this ruling. If you're excerpting a small portion of a news story for the purposes of critique, context, or comment, this ruling doesn't void that fair use, either.
Blogs that add their own criticism and commentary, which rewrite the story in their own words, reduce the incentive to read the original story. The blog acts as a news site and a substitute for the original story, which according to the article strengthens a claim of copyright infringement. The circumstances in which criticism and commentary would justify a fair use defense just got tightened, as did the amount of an article that is considered a sufficiently small portion to be fair use.
Woah, hold up on that false premise there. reporting consists of gathering information and telling people about it by writing original content. Some blogs do this, but many just recycle incoming news and slap their own brand on top of it. And there are far more editorial blogs that basically consist of some blogger's opinion about the news than there are blogs engaged in actual newsgathering.
If you're just quoting extracts of AP stories without doing any research, you're not reporting. And if you're rewriting, you're not infringing, because facts themselves are not copyrightable.
This ruling changed copyright law and fair use. Adding your own original content, if it leads people to read your blog rather than click through to the AP article, enhances the claim of copyright infringement because your blog is now competing with the AP as a substitute source for news. Your original content no longer enhances your fair use defense, as it did before this ruling, but now enhances the copyright holder's claim of infringement. RTFA!
We're not talking about what Meltwater did. We're not talking about blogs that mindlessly copy and paste content. We're not talking about what used to be considered fair use before this new ruling that changed the law. We're talking about the new standard laid down by Judge Denise Cote that would make copyright infingers of every ordinary blogger who played by the rules of what the rules were last week.
That new standard is that if people might view your blog as a place to read the news, you are guilty of copyright infringement if you quote as much as a single sentence of another person's news article. RTFA!
That new standard is that if people might view your blog as a place to read the news, you are guilty of copyright infringement if you quote as much as a single sentence of another person's news article.
LOL no. This is so far off the marks that I think any attempt at explaining it is going to be waste of time. If you seriously disagree, I invite you to cite to the opinion in making your argument.
For example, on the 'transformative nature of the work' test (p.32) the court had this to say:
Neither the purpose nor use of the Meltwater News Reports,nor its excerpts from the Registered Articles in the NewsReports, is transformative. Meltwater uses its computer programs to automatically capture and republish designated segments of text from news articles, without adding any commentary or insight in its News Reports. Meltwater copies AP content in order to make money directly from the undiluted use of the copyrighted material; this is the central feature of its business model and not an incidental consequence of the use to which it puts the copyrighted material. Thus, it is not surprising that Meltwater’s own marketing materials convey an intent to serve as a substitute for AP’s news service.
This directly contradicts your claim that adding your own original content enhances the claim of copyright infringement. In fact, the exact opposite is true.