AP v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc. - 931 F. Supp. 2d 537 (S.D.N.Y. 2013)

Rule:

The fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. Pursuant to the Copyright Act, all grants of exclusive rights in a copyright must be made in writing. 17 U.S.C. § 204(a). Nonexclusive licenses, however, need not be in writing. 17 U.S.C. § 101. Thus, a nonexclusive license can be granted orally or it can be implied from conduct.

Facts:

Plaintiff, The Associated Press was a news cooperative, filed this action against defendants, Meltwater U.S. Holdings Inc., Meltwater News U.S. Inc., and Meltwater News US1 Inc., an Internet media monitoring service. In this action, plaintiff principally contends that defendants were infringing plaintiff’s copyright in its published news stories. Defendant uses a computer program to scrape news articles on the web and, among other things, provides excerpts of those stories, including many plaintiff’s stories, in reports it sends each weekday to its subscribers. Plaintiff's amended complaint asserts six causes of action with respect to the Registered Articles. In response, defendant has raised four counterclaims. Both sides filed the instant cross motions for summary judgment. Both parties moved for summary judgment on defendant's principal defense of fair use of the Registered Articles. Plaintiff has also moved for summary judgment on defendant’s implied license defense.

Issue:

1. Was the defense of fair use by defendants proper? 

2. Was the defense of implied license granted by plaintiff to defendant has merit? 

Answer:

1. No. 2. No.

Conclusion:

1. The court held that in determining whether a defendant has made fair use of the plaintiff's copyrighted work, the court is guided by four non-exclusive statutory factors; and when these four factors are examined in light of the purpose of the copyright law, plaintiff has shown through undisputed evidence that defendant’s copying is not protected by the fair use doctrine. Defendant has failed to raise a material question of fact to support its fair use defense.

2. The court found that defendant failed to offer evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that plaintiff impliedly granted them a license to copy and distribute its articles. It is undisputed that the Registered Articles were not created at defendant's request. Moreover, the parties had essentially no contact with each other before this litigation. As a result, defendant was unable to point to any interaction with plaintiff from which it could be inferred that there was a meeting of minds between the parties that plaintiff granted defendant a nonexclusive license to extract and re-publish excerpts of its news stories that appeared on the Internet.