International News Service v. Associated Press

The Court distinguished the facts reported in a news story from the reporter's particular expression of those facts. Although the wording of a news article may qualify for copyright protection, the underlying facts of current events are ordinarily public information—the "history of the day"—and cannot be exclusively owned merely because one party first reports them.

The case did not require recognition of an absolute, common-law property right in news. Instead, the relevant question was whether equity could protect AP's legitimate business of gathering and distributing time-sensitive information from a direct commercial competitor that appropriated the product of AP's labor.

As between AP and INS, fresh news was stock in trade. AP obtained it through organization, skill, labor, and substantial expenditure, and sold its timely distribution to member newspapers. That limited commercial interest was sufficient to constitute quasi-property between the two competitors, even if the public remained free to learn and discuss the facts reported.

INS argued that once an AP member posted a bulletin or sold a newspaper, the information became available for every purpose, including resale to competing newspapers. The Court rejected that premise because it treated the dispute as one between AP and the public rather than one between two competing news services.

A reader could ordinarily communicate news from a purchased newspaper for legitimate purposes that did not unreasonably interfere with AP's business. But INS did more: it systematically took the fresh information and sold it to newspapers competing with AP members, thereby exploiting the very market in which AP sought to recover the costs of gathering the news.

Publication was not an abandonment of the news for every commercial purpose. AP's cooperative structure and member rules showed that news was released for the benefit of readers, not to permit a rival service to free-ride on AP's investment. Accepting INS's rule would make news gathering commercially unprofitable and could undermine the service itself.

INS was reaping where it had not sown. By taking material AP had gathered at significant expense and transmitting it to INS customers as its own product, INS diverted profits at the precise point where AP and its members expected to earn a return on their work, while avoiding the expense of gathering the news itself.

The Court refused to limit unfair competition to classic passing off, where a defendant sells its own goods under the plaintiff's name. Here, the wrong was the reverse form of misappropriation: INS sold AP's commercially valuable product as though it were INS's own. Rewriting articles and failing to identify AP reinforced the misleading character of the practice, but the central wrong was the competitive appropriation itself.

The ruling did not give AP a monopoly over news gathering, nor did it bar independent reporting of the same events. It merely postponed a rival's ability to copy and distribute news that the rival had not independently gathered, for the limited time necessary to protect AP's opportunity to profit from its work.

The record supported a distinction between taking a report as a tip to guide independent reporting and taking the substance of a rival's article or bulletin without independent investigation. AP denied the latter practice, and the lower court's finding in AP's favor could not be displaced on the record before the Supreme Court.

Both services and the industry generally used competitors' reports as leads to investigate. Because AP's admitted conduct involved independent verification rather than appropriation of INS's finished work, the Court held that AP had not shown the inequitable conduct necessary to deny it relief.

The Court recognized that an injunction keyed to the expiration of commercial value might benefit from more definite limits. A more precise order could protect each AP newspaper in its own market for a specified period after publication.

But the record lacked both a concrete proposed revision and factual material sufficient for the Supreme Court to craft a more exact injunction. The Court therefore affirmed the decree while leaving the District Court free to refine the injunction's terms.