The supreme court has thankfully ruled that opening newspaper articles in a browser via a website link is not somehow a breach of the newspaper’s copyright.
The ruling comes after a three-year legal between the Newspaper Licensing Agency and a media monitoring company, Meltwater, which charges PR companies for alerts about their clients. After a dispute over fees that has already been through the high court and court of appeal, the supreme court was asked to look at the narrow question of whether the copyright of newspapers was infringed when a user browses content online.
Five supreme court judges led by the president, Lord Neuberger, found against the NLA’s arguments that browsing would constitute a breach of copyright because the newspaper article would be temporarily stored in the users’ computer.
The supreme court said it could not be a breach of copyright as it was a temporary page and the European Court of Justice had already ruled this would be an exception to copyright law, because it was a necessary part of the technical process supporting the internet experience. The supreme court said if it had found otherwise, it would have been:
An unacceptable result, which would make infringers of many millions of ordinary users of the internet across the EU who use browsers and search engines for private as well as commercial purposes.
But the supreme court has decided that the copyright issues surrounding web browsing are so important that it has referred the case it was examining to the European Court of Justice to ensure that the ruling applies uniformly across the EU.
Jorn Lyssegen, chief executive of Meltwater, said he was
Very pleased that the supreme court over-ruled the previous rulings by the court of appeals and the high court that the simple act of browsing the internet could be copyright infringement.
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