Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc., 12 Civ. 1087 (DLC).

• Decision Date: 21 March 2013
• Docket Number: No. 12 Civ. 1087 (DLC).,12 Civ. 1087 (DLC).
• Parties: The ASSOCIATED PRESS, Plaintiff, v. MELTWATER U.S. HOLDINGS, INC.; Meltwater News U.S., Inc.; and Meltwater News U.S. 1, Inc., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

931 F.Supp.2d 537

The ASSOCIATED PRESS, Plaintiff,

v.MELTWATER U.S. HOLDINGS, INC.; Meltwater News U.S., Inc.; and Meltwater News U.S. 1, Inc., Defendants.

No. 12 Civ. 1087 (DLC).

United States District Court,

S.D. New York.

March 21, 2013.

Elizabeth McNamara, Alison Brooke Schary, Colin James Peng–Sue, Linda Jane Steinman, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, New York, NY, for Plaintiff.

David Kramer, Brian Willen, Catherine Grealis, Tonia Klausner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, New York, NY, for Defendants.

Charles S. Smims, Proskauer Rose LLP, New York, NY, for amici curiae the New York Times Company, Advance Publications, Inc., Gannett Co., Inc., the McClatchy Company, the Newspaper Association of America, and BurrellesLuce, in support of plaintiff.

Julie A. Ahrens, Stanford Law School, Center for Internet & Society, Standard, CA (Corynne McSherry and Kurt Opsahl, Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, CA, and Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge, Washington, DC, on the brief) for amici curiae Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge in support of defendants.

Kathleen M. Sullivan, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, New York, N.Y. (Jonathan B. Oblak and Todd Anten on the brief) for amicus curiae Computer & Communications Industry Association in support of neither party.

DENISE COTE, District Judge:

This Opinion addresses cross-motions for summary judgment filed by The Associated Press (“AP”), a news cooperative, and Meltwater U.S. Holdings Inc., Meltwater News U.S. Inc., and Meltwater News US1 Inc. (collectively “Meltwater”), an Internet media monitoring service. In this action, AP principally contends that Meltwater is infringing AP's copyright in its published news stories. Meltwater uses a computer program to scrape news articles on the web and, among other things, provides excerpts of those stories, including many AP stories, in reports it sends each weekday to its subscribers. Meltwater does not dispute that it has taken expressive content from AP stories that is protected by the Copyright Act, but has interposed five defenses to AP's copyright infringement claim.

Meltwater's principal defense against the infringement claim is that its excerpting of AP news stories is a fair use. Even though Meltwater's service is a closed system for subscribers only, Meltwater equates itself with Internet search engines. It argues that search engines transform the work they take from Internet news sites by using that content for a new purpose, that is, as an integral part of an information-location tool. According to Meltwater, this transformative purpose qualifies as a fair use of the copyright-protected material. It will be assumed for purposes of this Opinion that Internet search engines are a transformative use of copyrighted work. Nonetheless, based on undisputed facts, AP has shown that it is entitled to summary judgment on its claim that Meltwater has engaged in copyright infringement and that Meltwater's copying is not protected by the fair use doctrine.

This Opinion begins with a description of the facts taken from the parties' submissions on these cross-motions for summary judgment. The facts are largely undisputed; where there are factual disputes, those will be noted. Following a description of AP's business as it relates to these claims, and then Meltwater's, there will be a brief description of the procedural history of this lawsuit. The next sections of the Opinion will analyze the legal issues. They will include a discussion of Meltwater's five affirmative defenses to the claim of copyright infringement: fair use, implied license, equitable estoppel, laches, and copyright misuse. Finally, this Opinion will address Meltwater's motion for summary judgment on AP's secondary infringement claims and some of Meltwater's evidentiary objections.

BACKGROUND

I. AP

AP was established in 1846; it is owned by over 1,400 newspapers across the United States and employs a staff of approximately 3,700 people. On any given day it produces between 1,000 and 2,000 news articles.

Each article is the result of a process that involves a number of creative decisions by AP reporters and editors. First, AP must select the topic to be covered in the article. The selection process can involve sifting through numerous press releases, comments made by politicians, and news tips received by AP in order to decide which topics are worthy of coverage. The actual writing of the story is often an iterative process, involving consultations between the reporter and editor about how to handle the assignment. During this process, the articles are reviewed for “completeness, clarity, balance and accuracy.” The structure of a news article is itself the product of strategic and stylistic choices. For instance, breaking news stories are traditionally organized in the form of an “inverted triangle.” The purpose of the “inverted triangle” structure is to include “as much key information as possible in the ‘lede,’ or first portion of the story.” As AP's Standards Editor has explained, an AP story lede “is meant to convey the heart of the story, rather than serving as a teaser for the remainder of the story.” In connection with this action, the AP obtained copyright registrations for thirty-three of its articles (“Registered Articles”).¹

The news products that AP offers take many forms. For instance, subscribers can choose to subscribe to a regional news product, like AP's Latin American News, or Asia–Pacific News. Alternatively, a subscriber can select an AP product that is focused on a particular industry, like AP's Business Alert, Defense Alert, or Technology Alert.

Each of the thirty-three Registered Articles at issue in this lawsuit was written by an AP reporter. Most of articles authored by AP reporters are published by its members or licensees and not by AP itself. Thus, a principal component of AP's revenue comes from licensing fees it earns by licensing uses of its news products to its roughly 8,000 licensees. AP earns hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees annually.

In the digital age, AP's license agreements have expanded to permit the publication of its articles on the Internet. AP's license agreements with its digital and commercial clients account for more than $75 million of AP's annual gross revenue. Many of the websites on which AP content appears permit readers to access the articles without paying any fee.

AP's licensing agreements are crafted around the kind of redistribution rights the licensee wishes to have. For instance, AP's licensing agreements with LexisNexis and Factiva permit those services to give their customers access to full AP articles and to search through AP's archives. AP also has licensing agreements that permit the distribution of excerpts from or snippets of its articles. The license agreements between AP and three news clipping services that are competitors of Meltwater are examples of this kind of license. One such license granted the Internet news clipping service a license to distribute “AP text scraped from third party AP licensee websites (“AP Articles”) ... as well as links to AP Articles and excerpts of AP Articles.” In a second such license, AP permits the Internet news clipping service to redistribute “Snippets” of AP articles “as a part of an aggregated feed of licensed content,” to a primary market of Media Monitoring & Evaluation companies who cater to “Internal corporate communications and PR professionals and their external agents.” This license defines “Snippets” to mean “headlines and leading 140 characters from AP content.” In a final example, the licensing agreement allows the news clipping service to make available directly or via its affiliate “snippets of [certain AP content] in response to search requests.”

AP also offers a web-based platform known as AP Exchange to its licensees, which permits the licensees to search AP articles by keywords. Each AP article contains metadata tags. These tags attach to certain information appearing in AP articles including people, companies, geographic locations, and organizations. Through AP Exchange, customers can run either simple or advanced searches to locate AP news stories. This platform also allows AP's customers to save their searches and to receive search results on an ongoing basis. AP's customers can receive email alerts when an article that is responsive to one of their custom searches has been published. In addition, AP has licensed its content to customers that, in turn, permit their users to search for AP articles using keyword search terms.

II. Meltwater News

Meltwater is an international “software as a service” (“SaaS”) company that operates in twenty-seven countries. It was founded in 2001 in Norway. Its united States subsidiaries currently have four hundred employees, nine U.S. offices, and an annual income of [REDACTED] of dollars.

In 2005, Meltwater began offering a news monitoring service to subscribers in the United States called Meltwater News. Meltwater News now has more than 4,000 customers in the United States. Its U.S. customers are businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies. An annual subscription fee costs thousands of dollars.

Meltwater News subscribers have access to Meltwater's “Global Media Monitoring” product, which offers a suite of online services. The Global Media Monitoring product enables users to monitor the news based on the presence of certain words or phrases in news articles appearing on the Internet and to receive excerpts of those news articles. Meltwater uses automated computer programs or algorithms to copy or “scrape” an article from an online news source, index the article, and deliver verbatim excerpts of the article to its customers in response to search queries.² Through this automated mechanism, Meltwater copied each of the thirty-three Registered Articles at issue in this litigation and delivered excerpts from them to subscribers.

Meltwater...