I was sad to see that the PRCA and Meltwater lost a ruling by the High Court in the battle against the NLA, which is trying to implement a licensing system for the distribution of online cuttings. The case is pretty complex, and there are a number of excellent summaries of the verdict.
I’m not a lawyer, but the ruling appears to have some concerning aspects. Robert Andrew’s article reports that the judge states:
However, it seems to me that in principle copying by an End User without a license through a direct Link is more likely than not to infringe copyright.
The judge also says that headlines can be considered “an independent literary work”, in which case repeating a headline in an email can also breach copyright law.
The big issue is that Meltwater is charging (and therefore making money) from the content. Using Google (who make much more money than Meltwater from indexing other people’s content) apparently allows you to sidestep many of the copyright issues:
It would apparently be open to the End Users to use such free services, or indeed a general search engine, instead of a paid media monitoring service without (currently at any rate) encountering opposition from the Publishers.