On March 20, 2013, the Southern District of New York held that Meltwater, an Internet news aggregator, infringed the Associated Press’ copyright by excerpting news articles and delivering them to Meltwater’s paid subscribers.1
Meltwater uses computer programs known as "crawlers" to scrape, or copy, articles from online news sources, thereafter delivering excerpts of the stories to its subscribers in response to search queries.2 In this way, Meltwater functions as a traditional news clipping service upgraded with searching capabilities, delivering its customers customized emails that contain news excerpts responsive to their specified search requests. With regard to the at-issue AP articles, Meltwater had excerpted anywhere between 4.5 percent to 60 percent of the stories, including what AP asserted was the critical aspect of the storiesthe lede sentence.
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