Is Clipping Articles Fair Use? U.S. Court Says No

The term "fair use" gets thrown around a lot in copyright cases, and it refers to an exception to copyright law that allows for the publication of portions or derivations of a copyrighted work — without the permission of the original creator. On the web, fair use has been used to defend aggregators such as Google News, since they take portions of articles to create a service.

Does that label also apply to a service that does a similar thing, but for a newsletter? A U.S. court recently said it doesn't.

As paidContent describes, a federal court ruled that Meltwater, a Norwegian company that does "news and social media monitoring" was violating copyright with its newsletter service. Meltwater's service scans articles for keywords, then takes the headline, the first paragraph or "lede," and the parts of the story where the keyword appears.