Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, news organizations sought not rights over facts themselves but protections for their investments in gathering news. Because being first provided a market edge and more advertising dollars, the cost of gathering news-particularly with the telegraph-rose. Yet the story of changes to copyright in news, in Slauter's hands, cannot be told in a straight line, but rather as the accretion of arguments that, almost as soon as they were enshrined in a ruling, seemed to become obsolete. [...]in 1918, in International News Service v. Associated Press, the United States Supreme Court ruled that newspapers could protect their reports from other organizations, a victory for copyright in news. A skein of Slauter's densely woven history is that copyright for news was not only never detached from copyright for creative works, but also was often the fuel that sharpened the terms of copyright for creative expressions. [...]in an 1828 case involving a commercial advertiser, "the case of news would continue to test the boundaries of copyright law" (140), while an 1876 case involving Western Union and protections for news "led a judge to articulate what he saw as the appropriate boundaries of copyright law" (232).