The UK Supreme Court has ruled that browsing via a website link do not violate the newspapers’ copyright, overruling earlier ruling by the high court.
The ruling follows a three-year legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) and a media monitoring firm, Meltwater, which charges PR firms for alerts about their clients.
Earlier court rulings established that newspaper article headlines, and extracts of articles, are safeguarded by copyright and ordered Meltwater’s clients in the PR industry to require a licence to use them.
Five Supreme Court judges ruled against the NLA’s arguments that browsing would be a breach of copyright as the newspaper article would be momentarily stored in the users’ PC and generate a cache page.
The Supreme Court said it would not be a copyright violation as it was a temporary page and the European Court of Justice had ruled this would be an exemption to copyright law, as it forms part of the technical process supporting the browsing experience.
Additionally, the Court has sought the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to make a perfect ruling on the case saying that it has a transnational dimension with potential inference for several people across the EU.
As per the EU copyright policies, copyrights holders are allowed to charge licence fees to users who make temporary copies of their patented works.
According to the Copyright Directive, rights holders are not allowed to charge if the temporary copies form an integral and major part of a technological process which is aimed at allowing a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary.
In 2012, the NLA and Meltwater resolved the outline terms of the ‘end user’ licensing agreement to the satisfaction of the Copyright Tribunal.
