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The 'Hot News' Doctrine in the Digital Age

By ALM Staff | Law Journal Newsletters |
June 28, 2010

Ever since (and likely long before) Paul Revere's famous “Midnight Ride” of 1775, breaking news has been a hot commodity. And given the ease of distribution of information in the digital age, news organizations and content providers have found it increasingly difficult to prevent its wide release over the Internet, particularly uses that do not necessarily constitute copyright infringement. It seems, however, that the old “hot news” misappropriation doctrine ' first outlined by the Supreme Court in its almost century-old International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918) decision ' may offer a limited remedy against Web sites that “free-ride” on content providers' costly efforts to collect and generate time-sensitive news and materials.

Last year, the Southern District of New York reignited the 90-year-old hot news doctrine and applied it in the Internet context. In The Associated Press v. All Headline News Corp., 608 F. Supp. 2d 454 (S.D.N.Y. 2009), the district court found that a newswire's hot news misappropriation claim against a news aggregation Web site that collected news stories on the Internet and repackaged them under its own banner was valid under New York law. Since that decision, a number of entities have attempted to use the hot news doctrine to prevent the unauthorized use of time-sensitive content, including most recently, financial firms and media outlets attempting to prevent news-oriented Web sites from publishing their well-researched content.

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