Categories: OLD Media Moves

Who "owns" business news?

Washington & Lee journalism ethics professor Edward Wasserman writes in the Miami Herald about the tricky question of who owns news after it’s been reported, using the recent court case between Briefing.com and Dow Jones & Co., the parent of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, as his news peg.

Wasserman writes, “But in the Internet age, news originators have a big problem. Within minutes of its first appearance even an exclusive news story would appear on dozens of sites that did nothing to produce it. Thanks to the speed and efficiency of search engines, the vast majority of readers will catch up with the story somewhere else, and the originating news organization won’t profit from its enterprise through higher audience numbers on its own site.

“That’s why it’s important that earlier this month a financial news website called Briefing.com paid an undisclosed sum to settle a suit brought by Dow Jones & Co., the worldwide business news powerhouse. Dow Jones sued in April to stop the Chicago-based website from helping itself to breaking news off the Dow newswire. During two weeks in February, Briefing.com allegedly copied 72 headlines and parts of 107 articles within minutes of their appearance on the Dow wire, according to a Reuters report.

“Now, what’s most notable about this case is that Dow Jones didn’t just allege copyright infringement. Copyright prohibits stealing somebody else’s words. It protects expression, not ideas. If Dow broke a story, copyright alone wouldn’t stop another website from rewriting that story and posting it.

“But Dow sued under another principle as well, the notion of ‘hot news.’ This is a somewhat vague doctrine that dates from a 1918 Supreme Court decision upholding a news service’s right to claim breaking news as ‘quasi property,’ according to an analysis in the University of Minnesota’s Silha Bulletin. That means the authors who broke the news could claim an exclusive right to the information itself, at least for a time.”