By Sarah Sorscher

European Court of Justice Cracks Down on International News Search Engine

Slashdot reports that on July 16, Europe’s high court held in Infopaq International v. Danske Dagblades Forening that newspapers have a claim against a media monitoring service providing 11-word excerpts from newspaper articles. DDF, a group representing newspaper interests, has sued Infopaq, a service that searches newspaper articles for key words and then shares snippets with clients. The court ruled that the news articles were covered as copyrighted material by several directives of the European Parliament, and remanded the case to the national courts to determine whether the copyright laws in each state would be subject to the ruling.