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Australian judge rules there is no copyright in headlines
September 8, 2010 | 10:36 am
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By Paul Biba
Don’t know anything about the Australian legal system, so I can’t comment on how much of a precedent this is. However it is an development worth watching.
According to paidContent, Australia’s federal court has issued this ruling in dismissing a claim by Fairfax Media over headlines in the Australian Financial Review.
The court ruled that publisher Reed International had not infringed copyright by reproducing the Review’s headlines as part of its news abstracts on LexisNexis.
But the judge ruled that none of the 10 headlines selected by Fairfax for the case “are capable of being literary works in which copyright can subsist”.
She noted: “Even if the article/headline combination constitutes copyright work, Reed does not take substantial part of such a work.
“Reed’s conduct in reproducing and communicating the AFR headlines as part of the abstracts is a fair dealing for the purpose of reporting news such that Reed’s conduct would not constitute an infringement of copyright.”
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Comments:
“Don’t know anything about the Australian legal system, so I can’t comment on how much of a precedent this is. However it is an development worth watching.”
It is consistent with the interpretation of copyright in Australia. In a sense it is exactly what one would expect — that is Fairfax (not short of a quid) trying to change things in favour of established corporate power.
We have rulings that make it perfectly legal to crack DRM on any owned media and make copies to any other medium; CDs, DVDs, Ebooks, etc.,.
Teachers can copy works for education that are not reasonably available for purchase, and 10% of any work can be legitimately copied for reproduction.
The English Common Law system means that rights are not defined by legislation but limited by it. Hence common practices and perceptions etc.,. can define how far things may go beyond the strict legal reading of the law.