When I began my journalism course just seven years ago, lecturers were flustered over the uptake of online news. Anyone could be a journalist now, thanks to Twitter.

Jobs were being stripped from nearly every department of the newsroom and research journos were being replaced with saucy, opinionated columnists – ideal for that quick online read.

Thankfully, it is apparent that the online media business is on its way to straightening itself out – media owners now have more of an idea of how readers consume news. Celebrations all around.

So when Moneyweb took Fin24 to court on accusations of copyright infringement back in 2013, they may have thought they would win considering the old-school style of print journalism.

However, that’s not the case. It all began when Fin24 published seven articles over a year ago that included news elements derived, with attribution, from Moneyweb. Fin24 explains it all:

In 2013, Caxton-owned Moneyweb accused Media24’s Fin24 of aggregating seven of its articles unlawfully.

Moneyweb subsequently launched legal action in a bid to force Fin24 to remove the articles from its website and pay damages at a later date.

Moneyweb editor Ryk van Niekerk also accused Fin24 at the time of committing “plagiarism on an industrial scale”.

Yesterday, the South Gauteng High Court issued its ruling: Online business publication Moneyweb’s claim that Fin24 committed “systematic plagiarism on an industrial scale” is extravagant.

Fin24 only committed copyright infringement on one of these articles while Moneyweb failed to prove that four of its stories were original.

Judge Berger found that three of Moneyweb’s stories were original. One of these stories was an exclusive Moneyweb interview with the said ‘mastermind’ of the alleged Defencex scam, Chris Walker.

Judge Berger wrote that it appeared that the journalist who wrote this story was the “only one interviewing Mr Walker”.

But with two of these original stories – including the Defencex scam story –  Judge Berger found that Fin24 had made fair use of them by not using substantive amounts of copy from these storie

Judge Berger found that Fin24 had made a “word-for-word copy” of a story about Anglo Platinum CEO Chris Griffith’s response to former Mineral Resources Minister, Susan Shabangu’s comments about the company’s decision to leave government out of its retrenchment talks.

Judge Berger ruled that a “substantial part” of this Moneyweb story had been reproduced by Fin24.

But this is the ruling that has now set the precedent for all online media publications:

In the judgement, the court also ruled that using a hyperlink back to the original web page of a story is sufficient in citing an original source.

Media24’s chief executive Esmaré Weideman has this to say on the ruling:

The ruling vindicates our conviction that our conduct was fair and lawful. The fact that the court ordered Moneyweb to pay 70% of Media24’s cost speaks for itself.

Discovery and reporting do not move public domain news elements into a monopolised private domain and to suggest otherwise, as Moneyweb did, would be contrary to the public interest in news dissemination.

It would lead to the illogical result where the first reporter can monopolise a news story and prevent another reporter from re-reporting the story’s core elements. Clearly this cannot be, and a contrary position would have been a global-first and would have destroyed much of news reporting and many of today’s journalists’ jobs.

Like mine.

[source: fin24&fin24]