Don't Copy This Headline
from the or-we-could-sue-you-in-Japan dept
A year and a half ago, we wrote about an annoyed Japanese newspaper that was trying to sue an online news site for copying its headlines. At the time, the case was thrown out by a judge who claimed that headlines were not creative expressions. As someone who writes plenty of headlines, I have to take offense to that statement… but still find it odd that headlines should be subject to copyright claims. They’re too short and often too straightforward. It’s different for some sites that use more creative headlines, but in many cases, it’s not hard to see multiple people come up with the identical headline independently. What happens then? Does the first news source to write a headline get to stop everyone else from using it? Think of the mess that would cause after mergers: “Company X Buys Company Y.” Whoever gets the story out can then stop everyone else from using that headline. Well, now we’ll see what happens in Japan. That original case was appealed and the higher court has ruled that headlines are subject to copyright protection.
Comments on “Don't Copy This Headline”
They forgot to tell 2ch
This site, a kind of People’s Drudge Report, copies all the headlines from many newspapers, often spicing up the tasteless details.
2ch is a free-for-all news and discussion forum, which has turned into an elaborate subculture with its own vocabulary and elaborate ASCII art. TV shows, movies have been made based on the 2ch culture — recently, a movie studio hired thousands of creepy nerds to look like creepy nerds and walk around the streets of Aki-habara.
Re: They forgot to tell 2ch
That Japanese news link in Googlish. Thanks, dorpus.
Stpo Copying
Very funny.
so....
does it just cover that headline for that particular story?
or is it that headline for any story forever more?
That sounds you hear is millions of copyright lawyers rubbing hands together with glee.
Movie/Book Titles...
Are not protected and this is the same issue. A headline, it can be argued, is the same as a book title.
I’m no lawyer however.
Re: Movie/Book Titles...
A book title is different because it is tied to an actual product that can be purchased. For a news publication this would be the name of their website or newspaper, etc, NOT their article titles themselves. So indeed they are not the same.
Automation
You’d think it’d be easy to generate 1-liners summarizing a body of text, wouldn’t you? Throw in a few key-word searches and some synonym lookups… assuming you can identify subjects, objects and verbs, should be set? 🙂