Thursday, March 08, 2012

AP Sues Meltwater for News Scraping

The Associated Press has sued news aggregator Meltwater in NY federal court for both copyright infringement and the tort of hot news misappropriation. The complaint may be viewed here: http://goo.gl/T4Zw8 

The hot news doctrine has not had much viability after an appeals court overturned the Fly-On-The-Wall decision (https://www.eff.org/files/FOTWopinion.pdf) and created complicated hurdles that a publisher must overcome before they can claim to own hot news. So far, no company has met these hurdles.

It will be interesting to see if AP can use it against Meltwater on these facts.

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