Nikki Finke may be known as having chutzpah to spare, but Deadline’s lawsuit against The Hollywood Reporter goes where few newsrooms have gone before, demanding legal remedy for “stealing” its scoops.
In the internet age of aggregation, where the lifespan of an “exclusive” can be measured in seconds, attorneys say Penske Media Corp., Deadline’s parent, faces an uphill fight to make its lawsuit stick.
“You can’t stop the world from using information you report,” said Thomas R. Julin, a First Amendment specialist at Hunton & Williams. “But if [THR] is simply grabbing that in some mechanical fashion, taking it and republishing it as their own, there might be some tort.”
Also read: Why Nikki Finke’s Content Theft Lawsuit Is Interesting, If Still Batty
In a response to the lawsuit, THR released a statement that basically said, that’s how news gets reported around here.
“An initial review of the complaint shows that it is replete with examples of stories that originated from widely-released press releases from publicists, or widespread confirmations from publicists to numerous outlets, including both The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline.com,” went the statement. “It is not copyright infringement to report these stories, even if on occasion Deadline.com posts them first.”
Lawyers say that PMC cannot argue that it owns the news and instead must demonstrate that the Hollywood Reporter systematically parroted Deadline’s reporting without performing any independent verification.
Also read: Hollywood Reporter Calls Bull on Nikki Finke News Theft, Will Check on Copied Code
Finke's lawyers may implicitly recognize this fact, because the demand for $5 million in damages for copyright infringement is tied to the alleged theft of source code, rather than news content.
The suit lists dozens of stories where the Reporter's version was posted less than an hour after Deadline, and asserts that Reporter employees “continue to engage in a practice of closely monitoring Deadline’s website minute-by-minute for the specific purpose of spotting key news stories and original content and reproducing them.”
That alone is not sufficient evidence to win a copyright infringement case, say the experts.
To prove its claims, Penske will have to conduct discovery, which would entail extensive research into how the Reporter collects its information.
Also read: Nikki Finke to THR: 'Get the F--- Out of My Face'
That could then give THR an opportunity to inspect Deadline’s operation -- which the secretive Finke would probably be loath to permit.
Over decades media companies have rarely taken their gripes about stealing scoops into court, so there is little legal precedent for Penske's attorneys to draw on.
Since the internet revolution, there have been only a handful of court cases and none of them have done much to clarify the difference between aggregating and outright theft.
One landmark case was The Associated Press v.
