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back to article News scraper Meltwater loses US court case

Headline-scraper Meltwater has lost another court case, this time in the US. The Associated Press brought the case in a federal court, with Judge Denise Cote arguing that the service had stolen an unfair advantage over its rivals by refusing to take out a license for headlines and excerpts. In 2011 the aggregator lost a case …

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  1. Ian Tresman

    No more AP

    I used to print the occasional news headline on my own site. I also thought that a headline was a permissible extract "for the reporting of current events", and that I was doing them a favour in driving traffic to their site.

    At least it will save me visiting their site, and I'll send the traffic elsewhere.

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    1. El Presidente
      Reply Icon
      Holmes

      Re: No more AP

      You mean no more glomming on to other people's content?

      Write your own headline, follow that up with a short amusing/insightful/pithy analysis then post the link.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Should have learned

    There's a reason the Drudge Report does not use the headlines of the news articles it links to.

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  3. Tim Brown 1
    Pint

    3.5m page hits an hour? really?

    As someone used to looking at weblogs I'd love to see a sample of the raw data from which the Daily Mail derives its page impression figures, the numbers appear wildly unrealistic for human traffic. I suspect

    a) a confusion between page impressions and file hits

    b) a vast amount of automated robot traffic being counted

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Childcatcher

    I presume 3,499999 of those clicks are webspiders.

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  5. James 100

    Fair use?

    The idea of needing to pay for "title and excerpt" of a web page sounds alarming to me - all too close to the shake-down news companies have been trying in Germany with Google, demanding that Google pay for the privilege of including their pages in Google's search results.

    Maybe Meltwater's "excerpts" were too big, but it still worries me in that context. If they were copying whole articles, fine, that's a clear-cut violation, but ...

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    1. Don Jefe
      Reply Icon

      Re: Fair use?

      So much news content is inbred anyway I don't see that it matters if someone copies a headline, they mostly all go to the same recycled content anyway with the most 'original' element being someone's creative (or hyperbolic) use of a thesaurus.

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  6. ratfox

    Also wondering the difference with Google

    Is it that Google does not charge for Google News? Or the fact that it sends a ton more traffic?

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    1. Tom 13
      Reply Icon

      Re: Also wondering the difference with Google

      Google makes a hell of a lot more than any news scraper out there. If you're going after companies on the basis of them taking money from you Google would be THE target to go after.

      They are currently escaping because of their "automated" system for delivery. Allegedly human hands never touch the data only machine algorithms. To me that just says they can just process it faster than humans could.

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