The Japanese Intellectual Property High Court has awarded Yomiuri Shimbun, a domestic newspaper, ¥237 700 (AU$2758) in damanges for copyright infringement by a website which republished news headlines without its permission. The Court overturned the ruling of an inferior court in March 2004, which held that news headlines ought to be made freely available online and so could not be the subject of copyright.
The infringing website, Digital Alliance, appears to have contained a collection of links to news articles which, when visited, linked to the corresponding Yahoo JP article. It is unclear how much content was actually displayed on the linking website itself:
The court said the use of news headlines by Digital Alliance was illegal. It is the first ruling in Japan giving protection to news headlines. But presiding Judge Tomokatsu Tsukahara said that headlines were still in a legal grey area as they are not mentioned under Japan’s Copyright Law. He did not order Digital Alliance to pull the Yomiuri headlines off its website.
Though I haven’t been able to locate the full English text of the decision, Associated Press is reporting that it appears to have been based partly on the advertising revenue reaped by the syndicating website, and the fact that Yahoo paid other news organisations for the rights to the articles.
The decision raises significant issues for syndicators of Japanese content. It suggests that publishers of news feeds may infringe copyright of the feed providers, unless express authorisation is obtained for such use. Whether making an RSS feed publicly available constitutes some kind of implied authorisation or waiver remains to be seen.
This website makes extensive use of RSS feeds — both to aggregate (and comment upon) news from other websites, and as a means to distribute stories such as this one. Indeed, the sole purpose of many websites is simply to collate various links or news articles into new forms — some from Japanese websites — publishing them in much the same way as Digital Alliance did (with attribution, a short excerpt, a comment and a link). This decision is thus particularly troubling.