If all news aggregators rewrote the news stories they gather, there would be
no copyright issue. Many aggregators, however, republish several sentences
from the original article without alteration or permission.189 Whether these
excerpts, and the accompanying headlines, are deserving of copyright
protection is a hotly debated question.190 Although the Supreme Court set a
low bar for creativity, holding that a work must “possess some creative spark,
‘no matter how crude, humble or obvious’ it might be” to be original and
protectable under copyright law,191 some words or phrases may lack the
originality to rise above this de minimis requirement.192 For example, ideas and
facts, in and of themselves, cannot be copyrighted—only the expression of