Last month I reported on a case – Associated Press v. All Headline News Corp. -- in which the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied defendants motion to dismiss AP’s claim that defendant AHN was liable for “hot news” misappropriation. That court concluded that the AP’s “hot news” misappropriation claim was not preempted by the copyright law.
A few weeks later a U.S. district court in Pennsylvania reached the opposite conclusion in
Scranton Times v. Wilkes-Barre Publishing, Co..
In this case the judge found that a newspaper publisher that copied a rival newspaper’s obituaries without permission was not liable for hot news misappropriation because the claim was preempted by the Copyright Act.
The judge explained that plaintiff’s misappropriation claim would not be preempted if it could satisfy all five elements of the hot news misappropriation test:
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