"Hot News" has proprietary value
02/26/2009Just when it seems like nearly hundred year-old legal doctrine doesn't apply to cases involving the Internet anymore, Associated Press surprises us. The news giant was in federal court on Tuesday, regarding a lawsuit against AHN Media Corp. and All Headline News Corp. for copyright infringement. The trial will continue after Tuesday's ruling that a legal doctrine from May 1918 applies to information on the Internet.
The doctrine comes from International News Service v. Associated Press, in which the two news services were competitors during World War I. The International News Service (INS), owned by William Randolph Hearst, had been prohibited from using Allied telegraph lines to report the news after a report on British losses, virtually cutting the organization off from quick access to the news. To continue reporting the news, the INS stealthily gained access to early editions of Associated Press (AP) articles, which the reporters would rewrite and publish as their own. Although this did not affect East Coast INS publications, such was not the case for the newspapers in the West.
This case brought up some key questions associated with the public dissemination of factual information, which to which no copyright can be applied (even then), for the most part. As the INS attorney, Untermyer, asked in the 1918 trial (as reported by the New York Times), "...is there a sanctity of property right reserved to the news gatherer against the effects of publication as to matter that is admittedly uncopyrightable greater than that given by the statute to copyright matter?" Justice Pitney eventually ruled that proprietary value could be applied to news, in some respects, as the companies and services that gather it do so at a cost to their organization, and that since news is publici juris, "the history of the day", as long as a profit may be made from a piece of news, it is considered "hot" news and cannot be misappropriated by another organization for a profit (thus interfering with the profit of the organization that obtained the information in the first place.
With the advent and proliferation of the Internet, the length of time that news is considered "hot" has certainly been shortened. Access to a news story is so much faster now that one doesn't have to go out to buy a paper, but can read it for free on the Net. Bloggers copy the latest stories to provide fodder for their sites (and don't always attribute them to the source), starting what can be intense and heated discussion and debate over topics like stem cell research, pierced puppies, and Obama's latest move as president. This is what the news is for, isn't it? To increase the population's awareness of the happenings in world and to provoke discussion and debate, which will inevitably lead to more news.
This week's ruling that the 1918 doctrine still applies is another Lego in the multicolored structure that comprises Internet law. Although the structure is continually manipulated by the hand of the law, with time it will become more solid. Meanwhile, the AP's lawsuit is to be continued.
