The UK Supreme Court has overturned a High Court ruling that readers who open articles via a website link are not breaking copyright law but has decided that the copyright issues are so important, it has referred the case it was examining to the European Court of Justice.
The case in question is between the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) and a media monitoring company called Meltwater, which charges PR companies for alerts in the press about their clients.
Meltwater had argued that since they operated a “headline only” service, without providing content extracts, its customers should not need licence from the NLA.
Rumbling on for three years so far, the Supreme Court was finally asked to look at the narrow question of whether the copyright of newspapers was infringed when a user browses content online.
The judges found against the NLA’s argument that browsing constitutes a breach of copyright, because the article would only be temporarily stored on the user’s computer, which the European Court of Justice had already decided is an exception to copyright law, as it is a necessary part of the technical process of using the internet.
The Supreme Court said that to find otherwise would have been “an unacceptable result”, as it would have made infringers of the many millions of ordinary users of the internet who browse for private as well as commercial purposes.
Meltwater has said that it is delighted with the ruling, as the High Court had previously ruled that headlines, article extracts and the opening of a link to an article were all breaches of copyright.
However, the Supreme Court has referred the case to the European Court to ensure that the ruling applies uniformly across the whole of the European Union.