[unyttigfjelltol]

Historically newspapers leaned more on competition law than copyright, because their pages are supposed to be filled with non-copyrightable facts.[1] Copying part, but not all, of a factual article, significantly after the relevant event, was considered to be a promotion (not unfair competition) and a nice thing to do for the journalists. Things change, people lose sight of the original principles.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v...

[vel0city]

> their pages are supposed to be filled with non-copyrightable facts

This is rather inaccurate. A fact is Hitler invades Poland. You're right, nobody can copyright this idea, as it is just a fact.

However, if I then write a 500-word article describing the scene of Hitler invading Poland, have short quotes from some civilians there, etc. that particular arrangement of ideas and words is copyright.

AP can't go and sue INS for just reporting the fact Hitler invades Poland, but if INS takes a whole article word for word and reproduces it that's still violation of copyright. The actual printed words of the news always had copyright.

The WSJ can't claim copyright on the markets going up yesterday. They can claim copyright on something like "After the bell rang in the NYSE, the tech industry ticked up 1.2% over last week. Meanwhile the whatever market took a hit of -0.5% ending the quarter slightly lower than our analysis expected. Blah blah blah..." If Investor's Business Daily wrote a different article that also talked about the markets ending up at the end of the day, that's not a violation of copyright. If they literally write "After the bell rang in the NYSE, the tech industry ticked up..." then they're violating WSJ's copyright. This was true before and after International News Service v Associated Press.

[nsagent]

Yes, the prose was always under copyright, but the key point for the case linked in the wikipedia article is:

> INS members would rewrite the news and publish it as their own without attribution to AP.

So the case hinged on INS indeed reporting facts that differed in exposition.

[nsagent]

These days most news is mixed with analysis [1] (which is often biased). I wonder if part of the reason for this shift is that analysis is copyrightable. It also seems like the number of opinion articles is ever expanding [2], though I don't have any hard numbers on that.

[1]: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/evaluate_news/source_bias

[2]: https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/rise-of-opinion-section/ Interestingly there's a banner at the top of that link touting an agreement between Axel Springer and OpenAI.

EDIT: formatting

[guipsp]

Even the facts are not copyrightable, the prose is.