Sam Ricketson

Intellectual Property in News? Why Not?

This Chapter addresses arguments for and against property rights in news, from the outset of national law efforts to safeguard the efforts of newsgathers, through the various unsuccessful attempts during the early part of the last century to fashion some form of international protection within the Berne Convention on literary and artistic works and the Paris Convention on industrial property. The Chapter next turns to contemporary endeavors to protect newsgatherers against “news aggregation” by online platforms. It considers the extent to which the aggregated content might be copyrightable, and whether, even if the content is protected, various exceptions set out in the Berne Convention permit its unlicensed appropriation.

The Berne Convention: Historical and institutional aspects

Declarations, let alone ‘solemn declarations’, are grand things. They have a tradition that goes back at least as far as the US Declaration of Independence and are exemplified, in the twentieth century, by various declarations in the international sphere, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the end of World War II. Other more contemporary declarations of rights have proliferated in specific areas of concern, for example, the rights of indigenous peoples,1 the human genome2 and human genetic data,3 and bioethics.4 Authors’ rights, too, have been the subject of a ‘solemn declaration’, although one that is perhaps less well known. This declaration was made by members of the Berne Union at the celebration of the centenary of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works meeting in formal assembly in Geneva on 11 September 1986. Reaffirming their commitment to protect the rights of authors in ‘as effective and uniform manner as possible’, these states went on to: