Amidst angry howls by the Associated Press over the internet CTRL C-ing its stories, Europe's highest court has whittled the line of potential copyright infringement down to just 11 little words.
The bar was set by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) this month in a legal dispute between the Danish media monitoring firm Infopaq and the country's newspaper industry body, Danske Dagblades Forening (DDF).
Take two people who think in a similar way, have a similar vocabulary and read the same newspapers. Expose them to the same facts and request a write-up. Is it reasonably possible that those two stories will have a string of eleven words in common?
"Having already won the by election in South West Widget Land" = 11 words
tangor
5:26 am on Aug 1, 2009 (gmt 0)
No argument from me! I think the parsing crowd is getting a bit fine grained! :)
Syzygy
7:12 pm on Aug 1, 2009 (gmt 0)
Here's the ruling in full from the Court of Justice of the European Communities [curia.europa.eu] for those that wish a bit more meat on the bones than offered by the Register.