The Associated Press (AP) was founded in 1846 as a not-for-profit news organization that published original content and photographs.

Licensing fees accounted for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for the Associated Press, and each contract was crafted to grant specific permissions of redistribution, clipping, etc.

In addition, each article contained a lede, a concise concentration of key information, which "takes significant journalistic skill to craft.

Meltwater's "Global Media Monitoring" product allowed its customers to search news articles by keyword.

When a customer searched for information based on a string of keywords in the database, Meltwater reported back a list of articles from all over the web organized according to that query.

It was not contested that through the Global Media Monitoring service, Meltwater copied content from each of the thirty-three articles registered under copyright by AP.

[1] AP filed suit on 14 February 2012 on six forms of copyright infringement and hot news misappropriation, and Meltwater responded with four defense claims surrounding fair use and tortious interference with business relations.

Furthermore, Meltwater did not deny that it used automated crawlers to scrape the Associated Press's articles for its news aggregation services and programs.

The opinion of the District Judge, Denise Cote, stated that Meltwater did violate AP's copyright by clipping and redistributing its articles without the appropriate licenses.

Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) v The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) was a 2011 case UK Supreme Court case decided in 2013,[7] essentially on the same issue (Meltwater's media clippings shown to clients online) and with the same defendant, Meltwater Group.

The rationale was that viewing of copyright works was not, and had never been, illegal in either the UK or European law,[7]: item 36  and Article 5.1 of the European Directive Directive 2001/29/EC (which covers "temporary copies"[7]: item 9, 11 ) permitted automated copying of a temporary nature for a lawful purpose.