Opinion ID: 219099
Heading Depth: 6
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: International News Service v. Associated Press

Text: The NBA Court briefly summarized the Supreme Court's seminal 1918 hot news decision, International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 39 S.Ct. 68, 63 L.Ed. 211 (1918) ( INS ): INS involved two wire services, the Associated Press (AP) and International News Service (INS), that transmitted news stories by wire to member newspapers. Id. INS would lift factual stories from AP bulletins and send them by wire to INS papers. Id. at 231 [39 S.Ct. 68]. INS would also take factual stories from east coast AP papers and wire them to INS papers on the west coast that had yet to publish because of time differentials. Id. at 238 [39 S.Ct. 68]. The Supreme Court held that INS's conduct was a common-law misappropriation of AP's property. Id. at 242 [39 S.Ct. 68]. NBA, 105 F.3d at 845. INS itself is no longer good law. Purporting to establish a principal of federal common law, the law established by INS was abolished by Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S.Ct. 817, 82 L.Ed. 1188 (1938), which largely abandoned federal common law. But, as the NBA panel pointed out, [b]ased on legislative history of the 1976 [Copyright Act amendments], it is generally agreed that a `hot-news' INS -like claim survives preemption. NBA, 105 F.3d at 845 (citing H.R.Rep. No. 94-1476 at 132). The House of Representatives Report with respect to the preemption provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act amendments commented in this regard: Misappropriation is not necessarily synonymous with copyright infringement, and thus a cause of action labeled as misappropriation is not preempted if it is in fact based neither on a right within the general scope of copyright as specified by [17 U.S.C. §] 106 [specifying the general scope of copyright] nor on a right equivalent thereto. For example, state law should have the flexibility to afford a remedy (under traditional principles of equity) against a consistent pattern of unauthorized appropriation by a competitor of the facts (i.e., not the literary expression) constituting hot news, whether in the traditional mold of [ INS ], or in the newer form of data updates from scientific, business, or financial data bases. H.R. No. 94-1476 at 132, reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 5748 (footnote omitted), quoted in NBA, 105 F.3d at 850. The House Report thus anticipated that INS -like state-law torts would survive preemption. It did not itself create such a cause of action or recognize the existence of one under federal law. It allowed instead for the survival of such a state-law claim. The NBA Court thus used INS as a description of the type of claims   INS -like  that, Congress has said, are not necessarily preempted by federal copyright law. Some seventy-five years after its death under Erie, INS thus maintains a ghostly presence as a description of a tort theory, not as precedential establishment of a tort cause of action.