Just weeks after launching NewsRight, a company aimed at monitoring the unauthorized use of copyrighted material, on Tuesday, Feb. 14, the Associated Press (AP) sued Meltwater News for copyright infringement and “hot news” misappropriation, the AP said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleges that Meltwater News, an international media monitoring service that according to its website offers paying customers "information from more than 162,000 global news sources in 190 countries and 100 languages," has been illegally "pilfering" and selling AP content, an AP story explained.
The AP, in its statement, stressed that the lawsuit against Meltwater "is not a general attack on news aggregators" and in no way does the AP "seek to restrict linking or challenge the right to provide headlines and links to AP articles."
The AP added that Yahoo News, Google News and AOL all have licensing agreements with the news company, but that Meltwater has refused to pay for AP content.
Meanwhile, Meltwater, a company founded in Oslo, Norway, had challenged the Newspaper Licensing Association (NLA) in the U.K., and on Tuesday, the same day the AP sued, the U.K.'s Copyright Tribunal reduced the NLA's proposed licensing fees, but also ruled that clients of news monitoring services -- and not just the service companies themselves -- also must pay copyright fees, according to PR Newswire and PaidContent.
