Press Releases

02/18/2009

Judge reaffirms 1918 legal doctrine in AP lawsuit

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge has reaffirmed that a 1918 legal doctrine governing "hot news" applies in the Internet age by allowing The Associated Press to proceed with a lawsuit accusing a company of redistributing AP breaking news without permission.

Although Tuesday's ruling does not break new legal ground, it applies a principle to a medium that has dramatically increased the speed at which such news travels.

Without ruling on the merits of the case, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel said the AP's lawsuit against AHN Media Corp. and All Headline News Corp. can proceed because the so-called hot news doctrine applies. The defendants had claimed it was superseded by subsequent federal copyright law.

Facts generally cannot be copyrighted, but the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1918, in a case also brought by the AP, that companies can sue for misappropriation when rivals copy time-sensitive "hot news."

In a more recent case, an appeals court ruled in 1997 that the hot news doctrine applies to the live transmission of basketball scores and other statistics, and Castel said Tuesday he saw no reason to overrule that court's analysis.

"What this does is it preserves incentives for the AP and other news services to make the investment they do make in journalism and news gathering," Andrew Deutsch, an outside counsel for the AP, said Wednesday.

In a statement, the AP said it was "extremely pleased" with the court's ruling.

"By preserving the economic incentive to gather and report hot news," the AP statement said, "this decision will further the public interest in having access to such news and also encourage the efforts of journalists."

Castel did rule against the AP on two counts, dismissing the news organization's accompanying claims of trademark infringement and unfair competition.

A lawyer for the defendants, Brian D. Caplan, welcomed Castel's narrowing of the lawsuit and said AHN "plans on vigorously defending" the other claims. And while Castel ruled in AP's favor on the application of the hot news doctrine, Caplan said he was "happy to test this theory in front of a jury down the road."

The AP claims that AHN copies AP stories from Web sites that legitimately carry them and redistributes them on its Web site and as a service it sells to other news outlets, competing for the AP's customers. The AP lawsuit said AHN employees delete information that identifies the material as AP stories before distributing it online.

AP's lawsuit, filed last year, seeks unspecified damages and an end to the appropriation of AP's material.

AP's Statement