The UK Court of Appeal has held that the unlicensed receipt and
use of headlines or extracts of online news articles, communicated
to users by media monitoring companies, will constitute an
infringement of the article publisher's copyright
(Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Meltwater Holding BV
[2011] EWCA Civ 890).
The media monitoring service offered by Meltwater
Meltwater offers a media monitoring service to clients,
including the Public Relations Consultants Association Ltd
(PRCA). As part of this service, Meltwater
monitors news websites using a "spider" computer program
which "scrapes" or reads the contents of websites,
identifying articles containing keywords that have been specified
by clients.