The court’s solution in Meltwater, which is aimed at alleviating modern
media outlets’ problem of generating money due to the added competition of
aggregators, carries several important copyright implications in England for
aggregators and content.161 Furthermore, the use of short snippets, even if only
eleven words, potentially infringes copyright if the excerpt constitutes a
substantial part of the original article.162 Finally, a URL link is not sufficient
acknowledgement of copyrighted material to come within the fair dealing
exception,163 which could possibly impact publicly available lists, bookmarks,
and summaries. Although these are possible effects stemming from Meltwater,
the case is too recent to have generated any major repercussions. In addition,
because NLA took issue with copyright infringement only when there was a
specific commercial option in place, it is unclear whether this case applies to
aggregators that do not have a preexisting commercial license with a
publisher.164