In its lawsuit, the AP alleged that Meltwater News had been pilfering current and past material from the AP and other news providers.
Lawyers for the San Francisco-based Meltwater News did not immediately comment.
In its lawsuit, the AP alleged that Meltwater News had been pilfering current and past material from the AP and other news providers without paying licensing fees.
"Meltwater News is an expensive subscription service that markets itself as a news clipping service, not as a publicly available tool to improve access to content across the Internet, " she said.
Media observers say the ruling against Meltwater U.S. Holdings Inc. and its Meltwater News Service, if upheld on appeal, could provide strong protection for the news industry as it struggles to survive in an Internet age.
The AP sued Meltwater U.S. Holdings Inc. and its Meltwater News Service in U.S. District Court for the Southern District in Manhattan last February, alleging that the company copies AP content and sells it to clients without paying AP licensing fees.
"This ruling makes it crystal clear that Meltwater wrongly used news content from AP to create its own content, while paying none of the costs associated with creating original news content, " said Gary Pruitt, AP s president and CEO.
Meltwater had argued that it provides a specialized news-related Internet search engine that allows its 4, 000 U.S. customers to search for and receive information about news items relevant to their businesses.
Meltwater is a 12-year-old electronic news clipping service that helps its clients monitor how they are covered in the press.
"None of these revenue streams can be sustained if news organizations are unable to protect their news reports from the wholesale copying and redistribution by free-riders like Meltwater, " the filing said.
Whereas Google News users clicked through to 56 percent of excerpted stories, the equivalent rate for Meltwater was 0.08 percent, according to figures cited in the judgement.
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She also defended the creativity necessary to write the first paragraph of a story, known as a "lede, " saying Meltwater "misses the mark" when it argues that ledes are teasers and not summaries of news.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote rejected Meltwater's claims that its use of Web stories drawn from a scan of 162, 000 news websites from more than 190 countries was a fair use of copyright-protected material.
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