Moreover is a news publishing service designed to bring
news to users very quickly after the news is published. It operates
free to use and subscription services.
AP said that it had sent letters to Moreover asking it to stop
using its material, but that they were ignored, forcing it into
legal action. The suit has been filed in the District Court for the
Southern District of New York.
The case seeks unspecified damages against Moreover and an
injunction stopping it from using AP material. It claims both
copyright and trade mark infringement.
"The Associated Press spends hundreds of millions of dollars
every year gathering and reporting the news, providing original
coverage of vital breaking news that cannot be obtained anywhere
else," said Tom Curley, chief executive of AP. "We've done this for
more than 160 years, often under tremendous time pressure and often
at great risk to our journalists. When someone uses our content
without our permission, they are free riding on our newsgathering
and our reporting of news from around the world."
The case has parallels in Europe, where newspapers have been
taking legal action against news aggregator Google News over its
use of headlines and the beginnings of news stories in its
service.
"As part of its policy of enforcing its intellectual property
rights, AP maintains an active licensing program across content
platforms and media types," said AP general counsel Srinandan Kasi.
"Thousands of publishers, corporations, educational institutions,
governmental bodies and other organizations, large and small, have
been and are active licensees of AP content, in some cases
continuously over several decades."
The suit says that Moreover is "reproducing, publicly
displaying, caching and archiving AP's articles on defendants'
services without AP's permission," according to Reuters news
agency.
AP is a co-operative, not for profit association of newspapers
and broadcasters.
