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Australian Court finds No Copyrights in Newspaper Headlines: Common Sense Prevals Over Overbroad Copyright Protection

By Andis Kaulins

At The Australian, James Chessell in Court finds no copyright in headlines writes that the Federal Court of Australia has ruled that there is no copyright infringement in the reproduction of newspaper headlines since they are not "literary works in which copyright can subsist" nor "a discrete work or joint authorship in which copyright can subsist'.

Headlines are just that, headlines, and they merely headline the news, i.e. what has happened or is happening or will happen.

To understand the logic of this eminently sane court decision, consider if the titles of text articles in journals or the titles of books were copyrighted. Then it would be impossible to make book or article indexes and to find things because every online mention of an article or book by title would be a copyright infringement.

Many more common sense sensible court decisions such as this one in Australia by Justice Annabelle Bennett are needed to bring sanity back into copyrights and into intellectual property generally.

Full post as published by LawPundit on September 10, 2010 (boomark / email).