Newspapers go all-in for copyright fight against clipping service

A copyright battle between The Associated Press and an online news-clipping service is reaching a climax, and the case could have significant implications for fair use.

AP sued Meltwater Group last year, arguing the "reputation management" company had a "parasitic business model" that violated copyright. Meltwater is defending the case, arguing that it is merely a search engine. Meltwater News is a media-monitoring service that helps corporations track what's being said about them in press outlets online. The company boasts that it can "track keywords, phrases, and topics in over 192,000 sources from over 190 countries and 100 languages" throughout the day. It doesn't send its subscribers full articles, but does copy snippets and headlines then provide links to full stories -- like Google News. Last week, the nation's largest newspapers lined up to tell the New York federal judge considering the case that they support the AP. An amicus brief was filed by The New York Times, The McClatchy Company, Advance Publications, and the Newspaper Association of America, which represents 200 newspapers around the country. In the brief, they argue that Meltwater isn't a search engine -- it's a competitor. The newspapers argue that Meltwater isn't a "search engine," but a competitor undercutting their own news-clipping businesses. In the brief, the publishers say that Meltwater is a threat to their own digital businesses, which are supported in part by revenue from "other publishers and users and aggregators." Those revenue streams cannot be "sustained if news organizations are unable to protect their news reports from the wholesale copying and redistribution by free-riders like Meltwater."