Overview

The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) has succeeded in its claim that recipients of media monitoring services need a licence from the NLA for such receipt and that receipt of, and access to, such news services would otherwise be an infringement of copyright.

Meltwater provides a news service to its subscribers, which sends them the opening lines and other extracts from articles on newspaper websites along with a link to the full article as triggered by specific search terms which the subscriber has pre-registered with Meltwater.

Proudman J held that there could be copyright in headlines; that the use of these headlines and extracts could be infringing; and that accessing the articles via links could be copyright infringement. Herbert Smith has the details.